Catalina vision

I grew up in a hazy place.

“The Bay of Smokes” was smoggy before anyone brought a car here. The inversion layer in the atmosphere holds everything in, and the higher humidity near the coast adds a Vaseline glaze to the air. Most days the mountains are barely visible.

Twenty-six miles off the coast is Catalina Island. It’s a small tourist destination for a day outing, and pleasure boats sail to its coves and isthmus. There isn’t much on the island.

On a typically hazy Newport Beach day, the question is always: can you see Catalina? On the beach, or up on Cliff Drive, or at the top of the big escalator at the Fashion Island mall, there’s a clear view of the Pacific. Does it just fade into blue-gray out there, or can you pick out the island?

As a kid I always wanted to see Catalina even when no one else could. I’d mistakenly pick out the Palos Verdes Peninsula north of us and my father would gently correct me, or I’d just pretend I could see it. I always wanted to see the island and was delighted whenever it was clear enough that the whole length of it, including the isthmus and the smaller secondary island past it, could be clearly seen. On very rare days when it was completely clear, Catalina looked alarmingly close. I remember on one such day asking my father if the island was coming closer. I must have been very young.

We had a 28 foot sailboat, just big enough to hold the family, and we sailed to Catalina many times. It’s an all-day trip in a sailboat. We had access to moor at White’s Landing in Hen Rock Cove. There are bison and wild pigs on the island, and I was languidly pursued by a bison once when I was about 9, terrifying me. But in general I loved our visits to the island and the cove.

The picture at the top is shot from the beach at Laguna, and Catalina is just barely visible. There’s a gradient between two shades of blue-gray, and there’s the island. The detail below might be easier to see:

There’s your Southern California coastal haze, and there’s the island. Can you see it?

Weekend and first bit of Zen.

That was a good weekend. Both Saturday and Sunday were mini patio reunions courtesy of two birthdays. I got to see people I never see and even on the sacred patio itself, which I never touch now. Plus, Zen.

On Sunday I went to an introductory Zen workshop at the Zen Center of Orange County. I recommend it for anyone local who’s interested. It was a four hour event with a break, and included an introductory lecture and discussion, some guided and unguided meditation, a mindfulness exercise of sorts, and a lot of information about possible next steps.

I found the meditation much easier than I had expected. Part of the reason I went at all was that after a year of neurofeedback, EMDR, and some other somatic therapies my brain is a lot calmer. I’d always been the guy with the constantly ringing phone in his head. A few times in my life I had tried meditation with varying amounts of dedication and knowledge, and always failed or at least felt like a failure. I could do the “Relaxation Response” in which you just relax every part of your body starting with the toes and then do it again, etc., and get some kind of detached or floaty state, but that was clearly not what any of the meditative traditions were doing. It was either a way to get to sleep or a way to relax when I couldn’t.

Most of the reason I went to this workshop was to get direction and instruction on zazen (sitting meditation) and they were very helpful. Posture is very important and it’s great to have someone looking at you and helping you with what you can’t see about the way you’re holding yourself. When I got the posture close to “right” it was much more comfortable than I thought. Some of the muscles complained about their new roles but I could do the short 15 minute sessions we had yesterday. The most difficult part was the eyes, which in this particular tradition are half-closed and unfocused, looking down at a 45 degree angle. My eyes wanted to be open or closed, not anything in between.

Part of the deal when you do the workshop, which is $60, is that you get a free month of sessions at the Center. I’m going to follow their suggested schedule of home meditation and visiting the Center this month to keep this fresh and see how it goes. I will probably continue to visit there if things work out well.

Maybe the best benefit of the year of Hell doing neurofeedback will be a brain that can handle zazen.

Zubie’s, or a trip to Grandma’s

Had dinner at Zubie’s Chicken Coop last night in celebration of berg74‘s birthday. Happy birthday, Dan! It was great to see him and other friends I’ve missed, including a rare appearance from Jeremy & Vicka.

When I was a kid we used to drive all the way out to Lancaster on some holidays to visit my Aunt Midge (Mildred) and Uncle Lee. They were actually great-aunt and uncle, and were old my whole life. We would sit in their drawing room and munch on Jordan almonds and talk, and then sit down to a classic Midwestern/Southern holiday meal of some kind of Large Meat, potatoes, overcooked vegetables, two kinds of bread, a ceremonial salad, and great big glasses of iced tea. It was a trip back down the family tree, and they’d tell us stories of the family going back to the turn of the century and before. That side of the family had come to California on covered wagons, so the family stories were and are fascinating.

Zubie’s is that place to me.

People who know old Orange County punk music may dimly recognize the name, because their original place is mentioned in the Vandals’ “Urban Struggle” as the cowboy bar. It was next door to the old Cuckoo’s Nest punk club, and the cowboys and punks used to get into it, which inspired that song.

That Zubie’s is long gone, but the family has the Chicken Coop restaurant, which took over a former French place in the 90s sometime. It’s eccentric. They serve pretty big portions of standard American home cookin’ cheaply, which is an attraction. A full chicken dinner is $8.95. Their specialty is fried chicken but they don’t call it that; it’s “broasted,” which is something old-fashioned restaurants advertised in my 1970s childhood. I think it must have been a fad around 1960. It’s a brand name process for pressure-cooking chicken as you fry it that supposedly results in less grease. No one under 40 even knows that broasted chicken is fried chicken.

The sides are mashed potatoes with gravy and green beans. By mashed potatoes I mean very, very smooth whipped potatoes and bland light-brown gravy. The beans are prepared the way my grandmother did, southern style: a bit overcooked but with enough salt and grease that you do not care about that.

There is a house salad that comes with your dinner. The salads got all confused but I think that’s what I got. For some reason it had shrimp in it. It was the iceberg lettuce salad of my childhood with a tremendous quantity of dressing. There were also rolls which were very soft and warm and required immediate buttering.

The chicken was pretty good if a bit dry, and there was a decent amount of it. The other diners got more food and many of them had to ask for to go boxes. Apparently overfeeding is one of the attractions of Zubie’s. I’m glad I got the right amount of food, myself.

The menu was full of weird quirks and errors. The “Oyster Bar” page was also labeled as the To Go menu, and had two entries for fish taco at the same price with different descriptions: one was the “Grande” and other was advertised as having two filets and being the house favorite. The pizzas were advertised as being sixteen feet in size due to an apostrophe/quote confusion; it was not stated whether that was diameter, radius, or thickness. When the check arrived it was totally incomprehensible so we just did our best and made sure enough money was there.

As you probably figured out most of the clientele was over 65, with a few families. In general it wasn’t a restaurant; it was a trip to someone else’s grandmother’s house. The food was home-style in both good and bad ways, there weren’t many options, and everything was up to the standard of a conservative farm-style dinner in 1960. I assume they remain in business because of old people and because of the bar.

It’s not the best restaurant in town but it’s a gem. Mostly because it’s a little piece of my great-aunt Mildred’s generation sitting smack in the middle of go-go millionaire decadent Newport Beach within sight of nightclubs where strippers and mortgage brokers are doing tequila body shots and stuffing coconut shrimp into their faces. I like the contrast.

Bizarre dog triangle

When I lived in Los Angeles I was broke and so were all my friends. One of the many people I know named Mary rented a room from someone with a house on the Westside. The other occupants of the house were the owner, her boyfriend, and a dog.

The owner was successsful enough to have the house but not quite enough to afford it, so her boyfriend paid rent too. It was difficult to keep the household going but the dog was very important to her, and the dog’s comfort required a yard. So sacrifices were made.

Increasingly it was apparent that the boyfriend himself was one of the sacrifices. The owner of the house preferred solitude to companionship generally and was also clearly fed up with her boyfriend in particular. She was distant and chilly with him, and made frequent references to his flaws. She was a driven person, locked on to career success and work, and he was pleasantly ineffectual and not a big earner. A general lack of respect for him prevailed. He kept trying to win her affection in a puppyish way without effect.

The dog herself was aged and arthritic. She was a friendly if suspicious black Lab who mostly sat on her dog bed or ambled slowly around the yard barking at butterflies. Her hip sometimes dislocated and it was clear she was usually in pain, but she seemed to be enjoying life as much as possible under the circumstances. She ate with gusto and would happiliy lie with her head on someone’s lap if ear-skritching seemed possible.

Mary figured out the dynamics of the household after a few weeks. The house’s owner could barely afford the place even with a paying boyfriend and a roomer. She longed to dump the thing and move into a small apartment on her own so she could save, and do so on her own. Her boyfriend was an annoyance, and his presence and sexual attentions weren’t a pleasure. But she couldn’t leave the house. She owed it to her dog to maintain a pleasant environment at the end of life.

So everything depended on the old retriever. When the dog’s life became obviously unsatisfactory, she would go. And with her the need for the house. And with that the “relationship,” since the only reason for the boyfriend’s presence was the few hundred dollars a month he paid. Watching the boyfriend pet and feed the dog and talk in encouraging ways about her health, you could feel desperation in the air. Good girl. Doing so well. Oh, wagging tail, I like to see that.

Mary moved out before the denouement, so the story remains frozen at that point. My father wanted to write a short story about it but asked my permission and I was terrified that they’d read it. He would have published it in the short story collection that came out later that year, and these people were exactly the type who would find out. He very courteously chose other topics. Would have been a great story, though.

I still have a visual memory of the dog in the kitchen of that place, walking a bit painfully but looking around in that friendly expectant way dogs have in kitchens, and the sad useless boyfriend feeding her a treat of some kind while his girlfriend told him he was behind on his chores.

If I could put time in a walrus

NO: AN INTRODUCTION: the Exploding Aardvark shares her “NO” tag.
My del.icio.us stuff tagged “NO” has some links in common, because the ‘vark and I share an esthetic of “no.”
And then, there’s my LJ stuff tagged “no.”

I spent most of the day in a shitty state of mind but had a nice long coffee talk with becauseshewas at which dawn_michele unexpectedly showed too. Good blather was had.

Want to know what keeps me hanging on? Chili pepper, that’s what. Specifically, hot sauce made from my own chili paste which in turn was made from chipotles, chiles de arbol, ancho chiles, salt, and vinegar.

Maybe I should take a jar of the stuff to therapy tomorrow and hand it to Carol and say: physician, spice thyself.

I appear to have at least temporarily lost all interest in cars. How’d that happen?

Chop wood, carry water, stem chipotles, seed anchos

If you’re looking for a mindfulness exercise, I recommend working with dried chili peppers.

Food preparation is the closest I come to meditative exercise anyway. Preparing the chiles means removing the stems and seeds manually, which requires attention to detail. It’s absorbing and keeps me in the moment. And if I lose my mindful presence with the task, I’ll inevitably touch my eye or nose or some tender spot with a hand covered in dust and seeds from very hot peppers. This is as good as a Zen monk hitting me in the face with a stick. Instantly, I am back in the moment.

Mindfulness, focus, attention, process, an absence of distraction, and finally: chili paste. So even if I am not a step closer to enlightenment, the next few dinners are greatly improved.

#1: The Tu-144

I was an airplane freak as a kid. I read about airplanes, watched TV shows about them, watched them take off and land from the neighboring airport, and haunted the local airplane museum. I didn’t want to expect to become a pilot, but I loved airplanes. When we flew overseas I was ecstatic the whole time.

I spent my second grade year, ages 7-8, in Paris. My dad had a sabbatical year from his university job and was using it to teach and research at the University of Paris.

Near the end of our stay in Paris, the big air show occurred. I desperately wanted to go, so my brother, who is ten years older, took me. I was in heaven the whole day. All the world’s civilian and military planes show off there; it’s the big one. Not only did I see all sorts of supersonic fighter planes and huge weird transports, but the airliners were new and all of the planes did weird maneuvers to show off. The Paris show is not only a big entertainment event, but also the big marketplace for airplanes, so everyone wanted to make a big impression with their product.

At the time, the prestige plane was the Concorde, the Franco-British supersonic airliner. There was nothing like it in the world; even the U.S. had failed to build a supersonic liner. It hadn’t entered commercial service yet but was already famous, and was doing the air show circuit to drum up sales.

Since this was also the middle of the Cold War, the Russians felt the need to one-up the West. They built their own SST: The Tupolev 144. Due partly to spying and partly to their own considerable expertise, they got the Tu-144 up and running pretty quickly. It was not only intended as a propaganda victory, but as a tool; their empire was so huge that being able to send a liner across it at Mach 2 was an attractive idea.

At the ’73 Paris Air show they showed it off. The Concorde flew first, demonstrating its supersonic capability with a nice kaboom. Then the Tupolev took off. As I recall there was a flyby to show off the speed, and then the plane went out to a distance and dove. There was a tiny wisp of smoke, which I pointed out to my brother. “You’re always too dramatic,” he said, “there’s no smoke.” The plane didn’t come out of the dive. Instead, there was a gigantic explosion, impressive even at several miles distance. A fiery cloud rose up and then there was just this drifting huge black ball of smoke as the blast noise hit us.

The plane had augered down into a small French town, killing everyone on board and some people on the ground and taking out 15 houses. We all quietly went home.

I never lost my enthusiasm for airplanes, nor have I had any fear of flying since. But I don’t go to air shows. That’s where they take airplanes to their limits and beyond, whether out of sheer macho, the need to sell, or national pride. At 8 years old I had just learned an important lesson about hubris.

10 (slight return)

I posted this more than a year ago and haven’t written most of them up. The Perry one I have, so a post is linked below. I shall proceed to document them, or at least the ones I can turn into an interesting story.

Ten Things I Have Done That You Probably Haven’t

Seen a supersonic airliner crash
Been sued by my psychotherapy clinic
Got a get-well card from the French absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco
Been a passenger in a WWII-era Grumman Goose flying boat and landed on water
Crashed America Online. All of it.
Been the subject of a months-long campaign of hate by Jane’s Addiction singer Perry Farrell ( the post )
Lived ten years in Los Angeles without a car
Had a warrant out for my arrest for jaywalking
Fought rats in the dark basement of a Venetian palazzo
Seen Charlie Chaplin in person

Don’t blame me, I voted for Zombie Joseph Beuys

And I did! Our comically corrupt and incompetent district attorney, Tony Rackauckas, was running unopposed so I wrote in ol’ Zombie Joe.

There was also a candidate named Martin Luther Church but I did not vote for him.

I ran into AJ Reznor tonight and we talked about books, which was nice. I think he’d like Lem so I was trying to get him to read some.

In ten minutes just now I found ~~three~~ four Christian Myspace clones: http://xianz.com/ http://www.holypal.com http://www.5loaves.net http://www.jcfaith.com/