Last night I had avocado ice cream. It was as good as it sounds. Full of ice creamy goodness, only with the guacamole flavor of ripe avocados.

It is a curious thing how there are almost no insects out here. Apart from a bee I saw on a bottle cap in a park and a moth who came in my window, there are almost no insects here. And I confirmed this with a guy who would know. Even in the woods, there is very little in the way of phylum insecta, even in the swampy areas where you would expect at least a few mosquitos. Not sure what to make of that. Another insect they don't have here is deer ticks, though they surely have deer.

I went up to San Rafael, to a park up there called China Camp, where I did a little mountain biking. About two minutes into the ride, a few deer stared me down. I am used to deer, as in upstate New York, there are plenty, and some are fearless enough to come up to the house. But you have to creep up quietly or they bolt, and even the ones on the driveway, who come within 10 yards because my somewhat demented neighbor feeds them, will still panic if you come close. But these California deer were like antlered-hoodlums, who hung in a pack and seemed bent on me leaving before they would. And when I made a comment about wishing I had my .22, it was not well recieved, even though I was kind of kidding.

That was a lovely ride though, including yet another Nike missile silo, this was sealed over with concrete, surrounded by now derelict military warning signs and fencing. To sit up there and picture sending a missile off with a nuclear payload gives you pause. It also made me think about the military in general, because a big part of San Francisco is connected to the military. For one thing, a choice stretch of 70,000 acres was just turned into a park that used to be a big base, at Point Reyes, which is famous for being all different colored grasses.

But even downtown, there is a gigantic swatch of a few miles of the city that were formerly military and those houses are now expensive private residences, even though they are unreconstructed barracks or officer's housing.

I have read that one of the big reasons a gay population settled here was that this was a big point of embarcation for the military, and as the militiary would kick out gay people, eventually a population of gay people stayed around and built a community, fought for their rights and dug in. Of course, times have changed,and now something like 1/3 or 1/4 of the population is gay. It is also worth noting that as part of the struggle a much loved city council member who was openly gay named Harvey Milk was killed, by an anti-gay cop who also killed the mayor at the time, a man named Moscone, who was not gay but was sympathetic to gay rights. The cop only got five years for the double homicide, which, understandably, caused protests. But the happy ending is that after the cop was released from prison, he killed himself.

So right in the middle of downtown is the Moscone center, which amuses me because I can't help but think of the real Moscone, that is to say Jonny Moscone, or Moskone as he might prefer to spell it, who, you might be curious to learn, just had a kid, named JaKob. MosKone is a swell guy, and of who I have only the fondest memories of doing donuts in his Dodge K-car in the highschool parking lot, wasting our teen years together.