What a weekend. I came to appreciate Marin a little more, by spending a little time strolling around my uncle's house in Petaluma. I think that Petaluma may actually be in Napa. But anyway, it makes no difference as it's close enough and you go through Marin to get there. And it's all very picturesque and natural. His house was quite nice, with a golf course out back. There was even a lemon tree, covered in lemons, as well as a fig tree, which was momentarily without figs but, in season, produced more figs than could be used by him. There were some heron on a little pond right nearby, and, he told me, a white swan, which lived there until it got hit in the head by a golf ball at which point it stopped living.

It is still quite strange to be out in shorts and t-shirt in February with blossoming trees. Back in the city, I had some of the profound aggravation of dealing with my newly arrived car. I had spent some hours in torment at the DMV, but now I had to put my license plates on, but found I had no screwdriver. I was able to get one from the hardware store, but still needed to affix my parking sticker, which is part of the Byzantine system of parking regulations they have in the city.

To relax, I went and rented a DVD, but it turned out that I could not hook up my TV, despite my newly acquired RF adaptor, generously donated by my uncle. Still, I persevered for about an hour, getting the correct wires until I was able, at last, to lie on my bare hardwood floor and watch the movie.

The movie, Human Nature, was ok, but I woke the next morning with a severe pain on my right side, no doubt from lying on the floor with my creaky bones.

The next day I went on a hike with a group of friends, who were all friends with each other but strangers to me, not counting one guy who was a friend from college. We went down about 50 miles to the south, which is a twisty drive along the water where you pass a Nike Hercules missile site, which kind of made me want to vomit..

Eventually we stopped at some small town to buy provisions and listened to some folk singer in a kind of bar/deli which was surrounded by Harley Davidsons. Inside, they had a fire going, and very few items for sale, though there was a Jackass calendar, and by Jackass they mean a donkey, not Johnny Knoxville. So for each month, there was a picture of a different donkey, with a pun written near it, like, October, light a fire under your ass, and the picture is a donkey straddling a campfire.

Eventually, we moved on and made it up into the woods, which were quite nice, even though I was not really wearing the right kind of gear for it. But they were an inviting group, even offering me to share their fresh artichoke bread, which tasted like it had fish water dripped on it.

We stopped to stare at a very frightening person's house in a desolate stretch of road, who had a large skeleton out front holding what appeared to be a real machine gun, and there was a piece of sheet metal riddled with bullet holes. This was in addition to the pack of about five Rottweillers in the yard.

It was unnerving, almost as much as the confession by one guy with us, who had been following our car on his motorcycle, that he had taken Oxycontin* before joining out party. He also told me that when he crashed his motorcycle due to a motorist's carelessness, he got up and beat the driver. Apart from a ribald conversation about genital piercing during which I learned that a Prince Albert results in triple stream of "squirrelly" pee, they seemed like a nice bunch of guys, with a really developed interest in a banana slug, which we encountered. One guy told me he licked one, which I presumed was for a hallucinogenic property, but in fact he did just to see what they taste like (acetone). We also met up with a salamander, which was played with until it squirted its musk out and scared off all concerned.

Not including the bit where we stopped on the beach on the way back and I picked up a frisbee that I can only suppose had landed in phlegmy spit covered in sand, it was a pretty fun day.

Luckily I had bought a kitchen knife earlier in the day, so after they dropped me off in the ghetto and I was walking home after dark and had to go through some bad sections, I could take heart in knowing I was armed for a good slashing.

* Oxycontin is a cancer medicine given for pain, routinely abused and said to have the effects of a cleaner and less addictive synthetic form of heroin. Easily confused with sperm killing non-oxal nine, as well as the active ingredient in acne medicine, Oxy ,use to Oxy-cute zits, Oxycontin has caught on among rural drug abusers and is frequently called "Hillbilly Heroin"..