Week Two

Time really flies when you get to subtract three hours from your start time.

Things are much more settled in here, now that the basics, such as a place to live, a phone, etc, as well as my work life are all more or less in order. Still, when I go out to shpotz, I sit solo, staring at my food. Funny how eating meals by myself in New York seemed perfectly natural, but here I am totally self conscious about it.

I did have a little comedy in my apartment early on, when I tried to adjust the heat. I guess the heat is emerging as a kind of theme here as a problem. Which is counter intuitive, as Northern California, while chilly, is much warmer than New York, but in New York, everyone has heat, where here it seems like an afterthought. In my actual apartment, the heat only comes on for several hours in the evening. I didn't know that my first day here and they had one of those plastic guards mounted on the wall to prevent you from changing it and as I was shivering from the cold, I eventually smashed it off, only to discover I could set the heat as high as I wanted and it wouldn't make any difference, as the thermostat only regulated heat, it didn't make the furnace go on.

I did go for a brief soujourn up to Marin and Sonoma. Which was nice, though not at all in the way I expected. In San Francisco, where every other car is a BMW and Porche, all you hear is about how all the money is up in Marin. A tiny run down house in San Francisco is well over a million dollars, so I was picturing something like a picturesque version of Malibu meets Provence, with some grand houses on big property, with some landscaping. But at least what I saw was not like that at all. It did have some nice hills, and they were sort of oddly full of cows grazing. But the houses were built with almost no spaces in between them. And right near these fancy houses, like a block away, there would be some ramshackle farm with sheep grazing in the yard. It was not quite rural, but sort of unglamorous.

It is near the bay, which is nice, but it was definitely not what I was expecting. Strange. It's all very third worldish, right down to the pastel colors they paint their flat boxey houses and natural disasters that seem to come by every year or two. They are really into natural disasters around here and I don't just mean earthquakes. There are wild fires, mudslides, washouts, floods, something called rogue waves that can crush you to death and suck you out to sea when you are only in up to your ankle.

There is a certain kind of crazy person here, who is tall, has a big nose and a protruding Adam's Apple, kind of like R. Crumb. But I have seen these people everywhere, skeletal, intense, half mad stare and usually in some old model American car, like a Pontiac station wagon from 1977. I find these people scary, as they all seem to be mad about something. I'm told that a little further up the coast, everyone is like this. Not Marin or Sonoma, but like five hours north, where no one goes, there are just hordes of crazy white people talking all manner of crazy shit. I suppose that is what Montana is like too, though I'll never find out.

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