Last night, or evening really, we made a foray into Berkeley. Technically, this was not the first trip there, but functionally it was, since last time, the only other time, was at night and everything was closed. This time it was about five in the afternoon. People were out and life was as normal as it gets. Like a lot of college towns, Berkely has a fairly bad downtown, with a lot of homeless pushing shopping carts and liquor stores. As you get closer to the campus, the stores are more of the organic juice variety and the people on the street are students or graduate students. Berkely is famous for its radicalism, though most of that was 1960s radicalism, when such confrontations would occur where the school wanted to build a dorm on some open lot, studentsprotested, the cops shot them with shotguns killing one and blinding another, then 4,000 students marched, only to face (Gov. Ronald Reagan's) National Guard and for 17 days war raged in the streets of Berkeley. Nowadays all that radicalism is basically gone, though there are still some protests here and there, and there are a few grey bearded holdouts, who express their countercultural spirit and contempt for sonsumer American by walking across four lanes of traffic holding up their hand like a traffic cop.

We were on the way to what I was told was the best pizza on the west coast, a place called Zachary's. The plan was to get some frosted mugs of rootbeer and pizza. When you go in, a whole wall is covered in framed "best of" awards, from a wide range of publications. There are also blowups of glowing Zagats reviews. Of course, no place that is actually good needs to do that, which would be a first tip off, though I didn't need a tip off, since I already know what pizza outside New York tastes like. But I was trying to have an open mind, and several people had told me about this place with deep enthusiasm, so I was willing to suspend my disbelief.

Generally, I find its a mistake to suspend my disbelief. I don't need to tell you what kind of sub-food court drek the pizza was, with a crust that tasted deep fried, cheese that tasted like melted hot glue and too much salt. I don't need to tell you that a frozen pizza from the supermarket would be a hundred times better. Nor do I need to tell you that at the party we went to afterward, everyone was like " Oh you went to Zacharys?! Wasn't it AMAZING? The pizza there is SO GREAT" and of course I had to say yes, it sure was, though it wasn't quite like home. I let them down easy, because I don't want anyone to feel bad. But what was really sad wasn't how bad the pizza was, but the fact that this is what would pass for good pizza, when in fact is was deeply shitty. Oddly, I had almost the identical experience with a chain they have out here called Noah's Bagels, which are like airline food bagels, and peoiple talk of them with a straight face as being great. It really just makes me feel alienated, because I want to have these people join in my experience. Or I want to join theirs. Or somehow, I want it to be universally accepted that that Lender's supermarket frozen bagels, unsuitable for dogs, are way above what Noah's sells, and that a circle of white mush does not make a bagel.

At the party, I met a fairly interesting character, who sort of looked like Joe Pesce. He lives in Accra, Ghana and speaks 10 languages fluently and writes or understands about twenty more. And not just French and Spanish, and romance languages. He speaks Swahili, Urdu, Hindi, Swedish, Greek, Hebrew, Russian, Danish, Nepali and so on, plus a bunch of African languages I hadn't even heard of that are pygmie dialects, or regional languages. He was the kind of unflappable person you find in Africa, who told me stories about how when he was in the midst of a rebel takeover, he just went into the bar in his hotel, where, he reasoned, the bullets would have a hard time penetrating, and had a scotch. PLus he knew all sorts of things about Djubuti, which he told me has a moonscape and that a lot of very suspicious things go on there. Nice guy. It also turned out that he had been a yeshiva student at an ultra orthodox place on Pitkin ave in Brooklyn, but on graduation, had moved to Jamaica, which was radical enough, be he moved to Cockpit country, which is a fairly obscure region, which is sort of like the Indian reservations in America, not governed by local law and known for a very antique culture where people live in holes in the ground, which is why they call it cockpit country. At the time he was still wrapping his tfillin every morning and wearing tst tses, but he lived among them and learned to speak patois. This upset his rabbi father and eventually he became sort of adopted by a West Indian family, whose father was doing legal defense for Kenatta, which is what brought him to Africa. Anyway, to summarize the evening in Berkely: bad pizza, interesting multi-lingual guy.