The Second Bakery Attack.

"Yo! So, I’m shutting down [my company's] hosting stuff. Can you find a new home for [oldsite.com] by year end?" my brother wrote in November. 

Here's just how dated my old portfolio site is: The name at the top is "open session." Does this ring a bell, dear reader? Did you, by chance, use UNIX or FTP in the nineteen nineties?

Keeping that site alive was a form of digital hoarding. I accepted my brother's message in the way I might accept it was finally time to put a hopeless pet to sleep. I don't think a lot of people are scrambling to find my old McSweeney's posts, New York restaurant reviews, and early 2000s music reviews. I copied and pasted some text for my archives and said goodbye.

But there's one, legally questionable thing I want to keep alive, which is the Haruki Murakami tribute below. 

Now, these days, saying "Murakami is a very talented, absorbing, inspiring writer" is like presuming to tell people "There's this musician Prince who's very singular, get hip to it." But I'm telling you, at the time, some 20 years ago, he was not as pervasive. Anyway, I still get random thank-you notes from people for this transcription job, and my hope is that it will open the way for more book sales for Mr. Murakami, which he does not need, but does deserve.

Like all other Murakami, this particular story expresses three fundamental truths: 
one, you can never really know anyone; 
two, we all live with some past scar that will eat us alive if we don't deal with it; 
and three, some things just cannot be explained.

I especially like this introductory copy because I JUST centered a post on some landscape vacation pictures. 



Haruki Murakami: The Second Bakery Attack

Did you ever try to share something that impresses you very much with someone who impresses you very much, only to receive an impressive lack of appreciation? It's like taking landscape pictures from your vacation, and then showing them around. Just don't bother. This happened to me with Haruki Murakami. Murakami is a very talented, absorbing, inspiring writer who wrote the best short story I have ever read, "Sleep." He also wrote the following story (which is shorter than "Sleep" and thus more transcription-friendly), which I numbed my little fingers typing out one day at work, risking my job, eyesight and circulation for the sake of e-mailing it to three ingrates whose puzzled, lackluster reactions made them unworthy of my suffering. (I mean, I was also really bored and, in retrospect, potentially a bit touched that day; but that's beside the point.) I guess we must choose our cultural battles carefully. But if at least one person is searching for some electronic Murakami and is gratified by this page, my labor will not have been in vain. ============================================= The Second Bakery Attack, by Haruki Murakami I'm still not sure I made the right choice when I told my wife about the bakery attack. But then, it might not have been a question of right and wrong. Which is to say that wrong choices can produce right results, and vice versa. I myself have adopted the position that, in fact, we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not. If you look at it this way, it just so happens that I told my wife about the bakery attack. I hadn't been planning to bring it up--I had forgotten all about it--but it wasn't one of those now-that-you-mention-it kind of things, either. What reminded me of the bakery attack was an unbearable hunger. It hit just before two o'clock in the morning. We had eaten a light supper at six, crawled into bed at nine-thirty, and gone to sleep. For some reason, we woke up at exactly the same moment. A few minutes later, the pangs struck with the force of the tornado in The Wizard of Oz. These were tremendous, overpowering hunger pangs. Our refrigerator contained not a single item that could be technically categorized as food. We had a bottle of French dressing, six cans of beer, two shriveled onions, a stick of butter, and a box of refrigerator deodorizer. With only two weeks of married life behind us, we had yet to establish a precise conjugal understanding with regard to the rules of dietary behavior. Let alone anything else. I had a job in a law firm at the time, and she was doing secretarial work at a design school. I was either twenty-eight or twenty-nine--why can't I remember the exact year we married?--and she was two years and eight months younger. Groceries were the last things on our minds. We both felt too hungry to go back to sleep, but it hurt just to lie there. On the other hand, we were also too hungry to do anything useful. We got out of bed and drifted into the kitchen, ending up across the table from each other. What could have caused such violent hunger pangs? We took turns opening the refrigerator door and hoping, but no matter how many times we looked inside, the contents never changed. Beer and onions and butter and dressing and deodorizer. It might have been possible to saute the onions in the butter, but there was no chance those two shriveled onions could fill our empty stomachs. Onions are meant to be eaten with other things. They are not the kind of food you use to satisfy an appetite. "Would madame care for some French dressing sauteed in deodorizer?" I expected her to ignore my attempt at humor, and she did. "Let's get in the car and look for an all-night restaurant," I said. "There must be one on the highway." She rejected that suggestion. "We can't. You're not supposed to go out to eat after midnight." She was old-fashioned in that way. I breathed once and said, "I guess not." Whenever my wife expressed such an opinion (or thesis) back then, it reverberated in my ears with the authority of a revelation. Maybe that's what happens with newlyweds, I don't know. But when she said this to me, I began to think that this was a special hunger, not one that could be satisfied through the mere expedient of taking it to an all-night restaurant on the highway. A special kind of hunger. And what might that be? I can present it here in the form of a cinematic image. One, I am in a little boat, floating on a quiet sea. Two, I look down, and in the water, I see the peak of a volcano thrusting up from the ocean floor. Three, the peak seems pretty close to the water's surface, but just how close I cannot tell. Four, this is because the hypertransparency of the water interferes with the perception of distance. This is a fairly accurate description of the image that arose in my mind during the two or three seconds between the time my wife said she refused to go to an all-night restaurant and I agreed with my "I guess not." Not being Sigmund Freud, I was, of course, unable to analyze with any precision what this image signified, but I knew intuitively that it was a revelation. Which is why--the almost grotesque intensity of my hunger notwithstanding--I all but automatically agreed with her thesis (or declaration). We did the only thing we could do: opened the beer. It was a lot better than eating those onions. She didn't like beer much, so we divided the cans, two for her, four for me. While I was drinking the first one, she searched the kitchen shelves like a squirrel in November. Eventually, she turned up a package that had four butter cookies in the bottom. They were leftovers, soft and soggy, but we each ate two, savoring every crumb. It was no use. Upon this hunger of ours, as vast and boundless as the Sinai Peninsula, the butter cookies and beer left not a trace. Time oozed through the dark like a lead weight in a fish's gut. I read the print on the aluminum beer cans. I stared at my watch. I looked at the refrigerator door. I turned the pages of yesterday's paper. I used the edge of a postcard to scrape together the cookie crumbs on the tabletop. "I've never been this hungry in my whole life," she said. "I wonder if it has anything to do with being married." "Maybe," I said. "Or maybe not." While she hunted for more fragments of food, I leaned over the edge of my boat and looked down at the peak of the underwater volcano. The clarity of the ocean water all around the boat gave me an unsettled feeling, as if a hollow had opened somewhere behind my solar plexus--a hermetically sealed cavern that had neither entrance nor exit. Something about this weird sense of absence—this sense of the existential reality of nonexistence—resembled the paralyzing fear you might feel when you climb to the very top of a high steeple. This connection between hunger and acrophobia was a new discovery for me. Which is when it occurred to me that I had once before had this same kind of experience. My stomach had been just as empty then...When?...Oh, sure, that was— "The time of the bakery attack," I heard myself saying. "The bakery attack? What are you talking about?" And so it started. "I once attacked a bakery. Long time ago. Not a big bakery. Not famous. The bread was nothing special. Not bad, either. One of those ordinary little neighborhood bakeries right in the middle of a block of shops. Some old guy ran it who did everything himself. Baked in the morning, and when he sold out, he closed up for the day." "If you were going to attack a bakery, why that one?" "Well, there was no point in attacking a big bakery. All we wanted was bread, not money. We were attackers, not robbers." "We? Who's we?" "My best friend back then. Ten years ago. We were so broke we couldn't buy toothpaste. Never had enough food. We did some pretty awful things to get our hands on food. The bakery attack was one." "I don't get it." She looked hard at me. Her eyes could have been searching for a faded star in the morning sky. "Why didn't you get a job? You could have worked after school. That would have been easier than attacking bakeries." "We didn't want to work. We were absolutely clear on that." "Well, you're working now, aren't you?" I nodded and sucked some more beer. Then I rubbed my eyes. A kind of beery mud had oozed into my brain and was struggling with hunger pangs. "Times change. People change," I said. "Let's go back to bed. We've got to get up early." "I'm not sleepy. I want you to tell me about the bakery attack." "There's nothing to tell. No action. No excitement." "Was it a success?" I gave up on sleep and ripped open another beer. Once she gets interested in a story, she has to hear it all the way through. That's just the way she is. "Well, it was kind of a success. And kind of not. We got what we wanted. But as a holdup, it didn't work. The baker gave us the bread before we could take it from him." "Free?" "Not exactly, no. That's the hard part." I shook my head. "The baker was a classical-music freak, and when we got there, he was listening to an album of Wagner overtures. So he made us a deal. If we would listen to the record all the way through, we could take as much bread as we liked. I talked it over with my buddy and we figured, Okay. It wouldn't be work in the purest sense of the word, and it wouldn't hurt anybody. So we put our knives back in our bag, pulled up a couple of chairs, and listened to the overtures to Tannhauser and The Flying Dutchman." "And after that, you got your bread?" "Right. Most of what he had in the shop. Stuffed it in our bag and took it home. Kept us fed for maybe four or five days." I took another sip. Like soundless waves from an undersea earthquake, my sleepiness gave my boat a long, slow rocking. "Of course, we accomplished our mission. We got the bread. But you couldn't say we had committed a crime. It was more of an exchange. We listened to Wagner with him, and in return, we got our bread. Legally speaking, it was more like a commercial transaction." "But listening to Wagner is not work," she said. "Oh, no, absolutely not. If the baker had insisted that we wash his dishes or clean his windows or something, we would have turned him down. But he didn't. All he wanted from us was to listen to his Wagner LP from beginning to end. Nobody could have anticipated that. I mean—Wagner? It was like the baker put a curse on us. Now that I think of it, we should have refused. We should have threatened him with our knives and taken the damn bread. Then there wouldn't have been any problem." "You had a problem?" I rubbed my eyes again. "Sort of. Nothing you could put your finger on. But things started to change after that. It was kind of a turning point. Like, I went back to the university, and I graduated, and I started working for the firm and studying the bar exam, and I met you and got married. I never did anything like that again. No more bakery attacks." "That's it?" "Yup, that's all there was to it." I drank the last of the beer. Now all six cans were gone. Six pull-tabs lay in the ashtray like scales from a mermaid. Of course, it wasn't true that nothing had happened as a result of the bakery attack. There were plenty of things that you could have easily put your finger on, but I didn't want to talk about them with her. "So, this friend of yours, what's he doing now?" "I have no idea. Something happened, some nothing kind of thing, and we stopped hanging around together. I haven't seen him since. I don't know what he's doing." For awhile, she didn't speak. She probably sensed that I wasn't telling her the whole story. But she wasn't ready to press me on it. "Still," she said, "that's why you two broke up, isn't it? The bakery attack was the direct cause." "Maybe so. I guess it was more intense than either of us realized. We talked about the relationship of bread to Wagner for days after that. We kept asking ourselves if we had made the right choice. We couldn't decide. Of course, if you look at it sensibly, we did make the right choice. Nobody got hurt. Everybody got what he wanted. The baker--I still can't figure out why he did what he did--but anyway, he succeeded with his Wagner propaganda. And we succeeded in stuffing our faces with bread. "But even so, we had this feeling that we had made a terrible mistake. And somehow, this mistake has just stayed there, unresolved, casting a dark shadow on our lives. That's why I used the word 'curse.' It's true. It was like a curse." "Do you think you still have it?" I took the six pull-tabs from the ashtray and arranged them into an aluminum ring the size of a bracelet. "Who knows? I don't know. I bet the world is full of curses. It's hard to tell which curse makes any one thing go wrong." "That's not true." She looked right at me. "You can tell, if you think about it. And unless you, yourself, personally break the curse, it'll stick with you like a toothache. It'll torture you till you die. And not just you. Me, too." "You?" "Well, I'm your best friend now, aren't I? Why do you think we're both so hungry? I never, ever, once in my life felt a hunger like this until I married you. Don't you think it's abnormal? Your curse is working on me, too." I nodded. Then I broke up the ring of pull-tabs and put them back in the ashtray. I didn't know if she was right, but I did feel she was onto something. The feeling of starvation was back, stronger than ever, and it was giving me a deep headache. Every twinge of my stomach was being transmitted to the core of my head by a clutch cable, as if my insides were equipped with all kinds of complicated machinery. I took another look at my undersea volcano. The water was clearer than before--much clearer. Unless you looked closely, you might not even notice it was there. It felt as though the boat were floating in midair, with absolutely nothing to support it. I could see every little pebble on the bottom. All I had to do was reach out and touch them. "We've only been living together for two weeks," she said, "but all this time I've been feeling some kind of weird presence." She looked directly into my eyes and brought her hands together on the tabletop, her fingers interlocking. "Of course, I didn't know it was a curse until now. This explains everything. You're under a curse." "What kind of presence?" "Like there's this heavy, dusty curtain that hasn't been washed for years, hanging down from the ceiling." "Maybe it's not a curse. Maybe it's just me," I said, and smiled. She did not smile. "No, it's not you," she said. "Okay, supposed you're right. Suppose it is a curse. What can I do about it?" "Attack another bakery. Right away. Now. It's the only way." "Now?" "Yes. Now. While you're still hungry. You have to finish what you left unfinished." "But it's the middle of the night. Would a bakery be open now?" "We'll find one. Tokyo's a big city. There must be at least one all-night bakery." We got into my old Corolla and started drifting around the streets of Tokyo at 2:30 a.m., looking for a bakery. There we were, me clutching the steering wheel, she in the navigator's seat, the two of us scanning the street like hungry eagles in search of prey. Stretched out on the backseat, long and stiff as a dead fish, was a Remington automatic shotgun. Its shells rustled dryly in the pocket of my wife's windbreaker. We had two black ski masks in the glove compartment. Why my wife owned a shotgun, I had no idea. Or ski masks. Neither of us had ever skied. But she didn't explain and I didn't ask. Married life is weird, I felt. Impeccably equipped, we were nevertheless unable to find an all-night bakery. I drove through the empty streets, from Yoyogi to Shinjuku, on to Yosuya and Akasaka, Aoyama, Hiroo, Roppongi, Daikanyama, and Shibuya. Late-night Tokyo had all kinds of people and shops, but no bakeries. Twice we encountered patrol cars. One was huddled at the side of the road, trying to look inconspicuous. The other slowly overtook us and crept past, finally moving off into the distance. Both times I grew damp under the arms, but my wife's concentration never faltered. She was looking for that bakery. Every time she shifted the angle of her body, the shotgun shells in her pocket rustled like buckwheat husks in an old-fashioned pillow. "Let's forget it," I said. "There aren't any bakeries open at this time of night. You've got to plan for this kind of thing or else—" "Stop the car!" I slammed on the brakes. "This is the place," she said. The shops along the street had their shutters rolled down, forming dark, silent walls on either side. A barbershop sign hung in the dark like a twisted, chilling glass eye. There was a bright McDonald's hamburger sign some two hundred yards ahead, but nothing else. "I don't see any bakery," I said. Without a word, she opened the glove compartment and pulled out a roll of cloth-backed tape. Holding this, she stepped out of the car. I got out on my side. Kneeling at the front end, she tore off a length of tape and covered the numbers on the license plate. Then she went around to the back and did the same. There was a practiced efficiency to her movements. I stood on the curb staring at her. "We're going to take that McDonald's," she said, as coolly as if she were announcing what we would have for dinner. "McDonald's is not a bakery," I pointed out to her. "It's like a bakery," she said. "Sometimes you have to compromise. Let's go." I drove to the McDonald's and parked in the lot. She handed me the blanket-wrapped shotgun. "I've never fired a gun in my life," I protested. "You don't have to fire it. Just hold it. Okay? Do as I say. We walk right in, and as soon as they say, 'Welcome to McDonald's,' we slip on our masks. Got that?" "Sure, but--" "Then you shove the gun in their faces and make all the workers and customers get together. Fast. I'll do the rest." "But--" "How many hamburgers do you think we'll need? Thirty?" "I guess so." With a sigh, I took the shotgun and rolled back the blanket a little. The thing was as heavy as a sandbag and as black as a dark night. "Do we really have to do this?" I asked, half to her and half to myself. "Of course we do." Wearing a McDonald's hat, the girl behind the counter flashed me a McDonald's smile and said, "Welcome to McDonald's." I hadn't thought that girls would work at McDonald's late at night, so the sight of her confused me for a second. But only for a second. I caught myself and pulled on the mask. Confronted with this suddenly masked duo, the girl gaped at us. Obviously, the McDonald's hospitality manual said nothing about how do deal with a situation like this. She had been starting to form the phrase that comes after "Welcome to McDonald's," but her mouth seemed to stiffen and the words wouldn't come out. Even so, like a crescent moon in the dawn sky, the hint of a professional smile lingered at the edges of her lips. As quickly as I could manage, I unwrapped the shotgun and aimed it in the direction of the tables, but the only customers there were a young couple--students, probably--and they were facedown on the plastic table, sound asleep. Their two heads and two strawberry-milk-shake cups were aligned on the table like an avant-garde sculpture. They slept the sleep of the dead. They didn't look likely to obstruct our operation, so I swung my shotgun back toward the counter. All together, there were three McDonald's workers. The girl at the counter, the manager--a guy with a pale, egg-shaped face, probably in his late twenties--and a student type in the kitchen--a thin shadow of a guy with nothing on his face that you could read as an expression. They stood together behind the register, staring into the muzzle of my shotgun like tourists peering down an Incan well. No one screamed, and no one made a threatening move. The gun was so heavy I had to rest the barrel on top of the cash register, my finger on the trigger. "I'll give you the money," said the manager, his voice hoarse. "They collected it at eleven, so we don't have too much, but you can have everything. We're insured." "Lower the front shutter and turn off the sign," said my wife. "Wait a minute," said the manager. "I can't do that. I'll be held responsible if I close up without permission." My wife repeated her order, slowly. He seemed torn. "You'd better do what she says," I warned him. He looked at the muzzle of the gun atop the register, then at my wife, and then back at the gun. He finally resigned himself to the inevitable. He turned off the sign and hit a switch on an electrical panel that lowered the shutter. I kept my eye on him, worried that he might hit a burglar alarm, but apparently McDonald's don't have burglar alarms. Maybe it had never occurred to anybody to attack one. The front shutter made a huge racket when it closed, like an empty bucket being smashed with a baseball bat, but the couple sleeping at their table was still out cold. Talk about a sound sleep: I hadn't seen anything like that in years. "Thirty Big Macs. For takeout," said my wife. "Let me just give you the money," pleaded the manager. "I'll give you more than you need. You can go buy food somewhere else. This is going to mess up my accounts and--" "You'd better do what she says," I said again. The three of them went into the kitchen area together and started making the thirty Big Macs. The student grilled the burgers, the manager put them in buns, and the girl wrapped them up. Nobody said a word. I leaned against a big refrigerator, aiming the gun toward the griddle. The meat patties were lined up on the griddle like brown polka dots, sizzling. The sweet smell of grilling meat burrowed into every pore of my body like a swarm of microscopic bugs, dissolving into my blood and circulating to the farthest corners, then massing together inside my hermetically sealed hunger cavern, clinging to its pink walls. A pile of white-wrapped burgers was growing nearby. I wanted to grab and tear into them, but I could not be certain that such an act would be consistent with our objective. I had to wait. In the hot kitchen area, I started sweating under my ski mask. The McDonald's people sneaked glances at the muzzle of the shotgun. I scratched my ears with the little finger of my left hand. My ears always get itchy when I'm nervous. Jabbing my finger into an ear through the wool, I was making the gun barrel wobble up and down, which seemed to bother them. It couldn't have gone off accidentally, because I had the safety on, but they didn't know that and I wasn't about to tell them. My wife counted the finished hamburgers and put them into two small shopping bags, fifteen burgers to a bag. "Why do you have to do this?" the girl asked me. "Why don't you just take the money and buy something you like? What's the good of eating thirty Big Macs?" I shook my head. My wife explained, "We're sorry, really. But there weren't any bakeries open. If there had been, we would have attacked a bakery." That seemed to satisfy them. At least they didn't ask any more questions. Then my wife ordered two large Cokes from the girl and paid for them. "We're stealing bread, nothing else," she said. The girl responded with a complicated head movement, sort of like nodding and sort of like shaking. She was probably trying to do both at the same time. I thought I had some idea how she felt. My wife then pulled a ball of twine from her pocket--she came equipped--and tied the three to a post as expertly as if she were sewing on buttons. She asked if the cord hurt, or if anyone wanted to go to the toilet, but no one said a word. I wrapped the gun in the blanket, she picked up the shopping bags, and out we went. The customers at the table were still asleep, like a couple of deep-sea fish. What would it have taken to rouse them from a sleep so deep? We drove for a half hour, found an empty parking lot by a building, and pulled in. There we ate hamburgers and drank our Cokes. I sent six Big Macs down to the cavern of my stomach, and she ate four. That left twenty Big Macs in the back seat. Our hunger--that hunger that had felt as if it could go on forever--vanished as the dawn was breaking. The first light of the sun dyed the building's filthy walls purple and made a giant SONY BETA ad tower glow with painful intensity. Soon the whine of highway truck tires was joined by the chirping of birds. The American Armed Forces radio was playing cowboy music. We shared a cigarette.  Afterward, she rested her head on my shoulder. "Still was it really necessary for us. to do this?" I asked. "Of course it was!" With one deep sigh, she fell asleep against me. She felt as soft and as light as a kitten. Alone now, I leaned over the edge of my boat and looked down to the bottom of the sea. The volcano was gone. The water's calm surface reflected the blue of the sky. Little waves--like silk pajamas fluttering in a breeze--lapped against the side of the boat. There was nothing else. I stretched out in the bottom of the boat and closed my eyes, waiting for the rising tide to carry me where I belonged.

Just Pretend This Is a YouTube Video.

Hey guuyys,

So, I'm really excited for the new year annnndd so one of my resolutions for 2016 is to start posting more on this blog! Sooo as always, if you have any requests for posts you'd like to see, like things that you're uncomfortable about and want to share, or more audio excerpts like this one, or really like anything you want to see, just hit me up in the comments below.

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OK guys so that's it for this post. Don't forget to click like and subscribe, I hope you have a great rest of the day, thanks so much for reading guys and I'll see you next time.

Bayeeeeeeeee

I'd Prefer to Go Back to My Regular Work-Anxiety Nightmares, Thanks.

I was standing in a glassed-in, white-carpeted office, having visited on business: an interview, maybe, or a project assignment. 

Two men nearby were chatting as I was about to leave. 

"Yeah, I've had this assignment for weeks and am still waiting for details so I can do the research."

"Ugh, I hate it when that happens. I'm in the exact same boat."

They were exchanging weary, smiling gripes about being freelance. I edged closer, pretending to study the scene outside the window, so I could hear more. I had to get going, but this would be useful information if I ever went independent. 

"Yeah, on the other hand though—just think if we were regular employees. Then we'd have to be here for the mass shooting."

As the man spoke I realized there had been a popping sound in the background: steady, methodical gunfire.

I looked around, but no one seemed to hear it. People continued to mill about the white carpet as if it were a cocktail party. The men wore suits, the women dresses. Like Mad Men. 

"Why is no one moving," I asked myself without a question mark, panic gripping my gut. The sounds, which happened to be quite like the New Year's fireworks that went off in the neighborhood the night before, slowly came closer. There was no way to get out now. I spotted a table to dive under—too high, too open and too near the door to offer much protection, but it was something. 

Then, heart pounding, I woke up.

A Decade of Discomfort.

In the end I was too callow to leave up the mortifying karaoke video that I posted here briefly, but 2015 is calling for just one more tumbleweed of a post on this lonely corral. Believe it or not, Uncomfortable Moments turned 10 this year. Who knew? It doesn't look a day over 45, in Internet years.

Saying I tried to update the template to my blog yesterday—which is true—is like saying I tried to change the batteries for my Discman. Even an "updated" look for this hoary platform looks absurd, so I'm just going to keep on keeping it real here.* I used to be fairly adept technically, but that was back in the 90s.

Every December, Sir UncMo, who is an excellent photographer, makes me a book of pictures from the year. The book of 2015 has a lot of goodness packed into it.

First, we got a house, snow piling extra quietness onto the little street of 1950s-era colonials. The next month after moving in, we left for Iceland.

I expected it to be cold. I expected horse meat on the menus. I did not expect it to be so freaking relaxing. It is so open, and empty, that it feels like you can just let your worries fly out into all of that space.

You will try to capture it with your phone,  hanging out car windows and hovering above steaming geothermal pools, and your phone will simply blink at you and say look, I'm doing the best I can here, but why don't you just chill out and use your eyes?

After that came a trip to Hawaii for the third and final wedding among my San Francisco friends. And even though there are now children and husbands and many miles involved, the four of us still managed to escape for one more wine weekend this fall, before L. moved back to Oahu with her new husband.

Back at home,  Sir UncMo discovered the joys of Home Depot. "I think it is like Sephora for men," he said. I think he is right.

We zoomed in on the moon from the backyard, watched fireflies, and then butterflies, got startled by rabbits, cursed at squirrels.

In a year of unmitigated Trump and tragic headlines, I got another week at the beach with my mom and sister. Another year of being employed. Of health. Of holidays with family. Of angst over dumb stuff.

There's always angst over dumb stuff, which makes you temporarily unsee all the other important and good stuff, such as the thousand permutations of sunlight that you keep trying to capture with your phone.

Though the five-year diary tradition continues, other things have fallen by the wayside.  This blog, as usual. Any attempt to write with a pen in a journal. My Japanese studies. I also mostly stopped trying to figure out and record multitrack snippets of songs for fun.

"It's just a waste of time," I said of the singing. That's how I felt about the journals, too, and even this blog sometimes: They were pointless distractions keeping me from doing the Real Writing that I only fitfully manage to do after spending all day at work.

"I don't agree," Sir UncMo said. He argued that any one creative expression supports all the other creative expressions. Well, he said it much better and clearer than that. But I started to think that he had a point, and that it wouldn't hurt me to waste a little more time on "unproductive" pursuits. Just a little more.

So that leads to my vague set of guidelines for 2016. More instinct. Less fear. Fewer glowing screens. More real light, in a million new permutations.

Happy new year, friends!

* Update: After all that bellyaching, I am experimenting with a new template so that I can display photos at a better size without breaking the homepage. I don't know about this. It involves change.

A Metro Carol.

The day after that last post about kindness and commuting, this happened:

"Spare any change? A nickel or a dime? Spare change, spare change? A nickel or a dime?" 

The man made his way through the silent metro car, looking straight ahead. I'd seen him pass through the Red Line a few times before over the past year, always with the same refrain. This morning he'd reached the end of the car, ignored, when another man signaled to him and turned toward his bag. 

He pulled out a zippered, black case close to the size of a bread loaf and handed it over.

The panhandler wore a jean jacket and a hard-edged face that looked neither young nor very old. He took the case, which looked like it could hold CDs or something similarly undesirable, holding it away from him uncertainly. 

"What's this, man?"

"It's change," the man replied. Jean jacket shook the case and it jingled. His look changed from confusion to suspicious disbelief. "Are you serious?" He unzipped the case and peered inside. Coins rolled back and forth behind the opening. 

He stood staring at the man. "You're giving this to me?" He paused. "I'll spend it," he warned.

"It's for you," the man said, nodding and still. He was tall, heavy and stood with a roller bag. 

Jean jacket broke into a lopsided smile, pleased but obviously confused. "For real?"

"I tried to run it through the change machine this morning, but it didn't work, so it must be for you," the man said kindly. "Enjoy your holiday, man."

Visibly stunned, the recipient's looked turned somber and he stepped forward with an open hand, straight as a razor. "Thank you," he said. They shook hands, the train stopped, and the guy got off with the black case clutched under his arm. 

Transit.

"I check Uncmo frequently but no updates so I must assume you're living a life well at ease!" a friend wrote recently.

That seemed, to me, like a bit of a rush to judgment.

I took the picture above coming home on the Metro one summer evening. My biggest reservation about moving to the suburbs was giving up the trifecta: job, gym, and grocery store within 15 minutes of walking or (San Francisco only) driving distance from home. 

Most of my adult life has been engineered, to a perhaps absurd degree, around achieving this ideal.

Now, most days, I join the throngs of people braving a longer journey on a subway system so beleaguered that it's inspired multiple social network feeds dedicated to how much it sucks.

Moving into the Silver Spring house was a joyful experience, but the Metro part made me nervous. While living in London, and later in New York, being a subway commuter was utterly miserable to me. I remembered those train rides as dark, airless, dirty and depressing. They conveyed me through deeply lonely periods in my life, periods I was anxious not to revisit. 

I'd sit here all day if I could.

I still don't love commuting (does anyone?), but a series of small, unexpected blessings makes the trip from Silver Spring not only tolerable but even pleasant sometimes.

My stop is underground and dank, but far out enough that I can get a seat. Next, the train emerges above ground into the morning light. In cold or rainy weather I look at the people hunched at the outside stops and feel grateful I get to wait inside. 

For most of the ride, I can sit looking at the sky, reading a book or listening to a podcast, trying not to feel guilty for avoiding the news and email, because the news and email are my job. 

The train cars fill up as we go along. In crowded, small spaces like that, you can't think about the Paris attacks or San Bernardino. But you do. 

Grasping, I've started listening more to talks from Pema Chodron and other teachers who remind us that nothing can be taken for granted. I listen every day now, hoping for the message to sink in.

Lately I'm trying to go outside myself, do small kindnesses. Smile at someone or cede the way, even when it's hectic and we're all pressed. Maybe it's just my imagination, but it feels like I'm meeting more people trying to do the same. Trying to meet all the bad news with grace. Have these stranger-friends been here all along, waiting for me to see them? Or is it really that more of us are trying to unclench?

This fall has been warm—too warm, and I see pictures of gardens as confused as we are.

Music: "Shine"

How Many Licks?

The mother ushering three small kids into the ice cream parlor had an American accent, yet asked all three of us clearly standing in line, "Is this the queue? Is that the end of the queue there?" 

Having affirmed the obvious, she broadcast her directions to the girls. "Okay, let's stand in the queue behind these two lovely ladies!" We all stood for a bit, and then the two lovely ladies behind me decided to leave.

"Okay, now we stand behind this lovely lady!" the mom said. I ignored her, preferring to keep my loveliness hidden. 

Just then I felt a small, wet, lukewarm sensation on the back of my pants, right on my upper butt cheek. 

I turned around and met the steady, unsmiling gaze of a girl about four or five years old, wearing a bathing suit. I squinted a smile at her. "That's not a good idea," I said. 

The girl went over to the mom, who was occupied with a younger one. "I licked her bum," she said. 

I remained face forward as her mother put this together. "You said hi to the lady?"

The girl repeated it. The mom was still processing. "You what?"

"I licked her bum."

This was the second time recently that a kid old enough to know better decided to get touchy with me. On the Metro a few weeks ago, a girl probably six or seven kicked me by mistake while squirming around in her seat. When I politely ignored it, she nudged me with her shoe again. On purpose, on my pants. 

It's all personal preference, but I have a much higher tolerance for having my clothes licked than touched by a shoe. I raised my eyebrows and gave the girl a focused smile. "Don't do that," I said. The girl simply stared at me for the rest of the trip while her mother remained oblivious. 

At the ice cream store, though, the mom was not oblivious. "Oh," she said sweetly, as if the girl had just told her that she was considering licking butts as a full-time profession. "Were you looking for attention?" I didn't hear the girl's reply, if there was one. 

"Why don't you say excuse me and say hello?" she said. "That would be nicer." 

So then I had to turn around and pretend it was cute. I gave a slightly less squinty smile at the mom and waited. "What's your name?" The girl said. 

"Christina," I said. "What's yours?"

Despite just having placed her tongue on my behind, the girl suddenly got shy and crumpled away from the introductions. I waited as the mom unsuccessfully coached her kid on how to enunciate. 

"Violeta," the mom answered for her kid. As in, violate.

"That's a nice name," I said as the seemingly interminable wait ended and the counter guy turned to me, giving me a chance to distance myself from Violeta. 

After I got my ice cream and she got hers, Violeta edged closer to me again while her mom wrangled the rest of the order. I ignored her aggressively. She edged closer and closer to my backside and probably would have gone in for another lick, but she ran out of time and got called away. 

Now, I realize this probably makes me seem pretty grumpy or like a kid-hater. And I am grumpy, it's true. But I am not a kid-hater. Had these kids been toddlers, I probably would have melted into lickey-faces and smiles. And I get that this is just a little harmless boundary-testing. 

For my part, though, I feel like when you're past toddler age, certain behavior shouldn't be encouraged, and that behavior includes licking, kicking, or otherwise touching strangers. Really for the kids' sake as well as the stranger. Violeta didn't know where my butt had been, and I can guarantee that strawberry ice cream is far more salubrious than linen freshly basted in summer Metro seating. 

I'm not going to get into what's an appropriate parental response here, except to say that certainly in my family this incident would have resulted in a scolding for the licker and apologies to the lickee. 

Somehow though, I feel the need for a new tack here, in case I get Violetaed again. Any ideas?

I am just glad she licked my pants before she got the ice cream.

What Is a Daffodil?

A daffodil is a yellow, delicate flower.

That is what I would have told you before I moved to Silver Spring.

(Silver Spring is suburban hell. That is what I would have told you before I moved to Silver Spring.)

We saw this house on a rainy December day. It was warm and lit, the family evacuated temporarily, and there were just-baked cupcakes on the stove. It was a Home.



In the dark of February, we moved in, and so did the snow. The yard outside, white through the window pane, seemed like just a picture. Tree branches, low and forgiving, held out the precip measurements: two inches, three inches. Relentless.



The dining room was empty, and the extra bedroom was still pink, when my family came over to visit the house. My dad is the one who noticed something in the backyard, coming out of the mulch.

Daffodils, he said.

Really, I said. Wow. They were green blades slicing, improbably, through the nearly frozen soil. Having lived in the city so many years, I would have had no idea what the hell they were.

In the twentysomething temperatures, we turned off the humidifier, as warned, so that it wouldn't freeze and shut down the heat. We unpacked, and we waited.

My dad was right. The blades unsheathed themselves. Pale yellow flowers eventually marched into our yard. They lined the back wall, they streamed down the front walk.

We bought the house on hope, cupcakes, warmth, urban fatigue, and luck. It was built in 1948. 

A daffodil is a perennial, a bulb that you drop in the ground that flowers anew each year.

(Silver Spring is worth considering when your work is in the city but you're tired of sirens and exhaust.)

"They'll only last a few weeks," my dad said of the daffodils. I finally understood (i.e. finally asked) why he always went to the trouble of planting annuals, those cheery little flowers bound to last only until fall if they were lucky. 

The annuals would last until fall, that was the point. 

What else did he know that I hadn't asked about?

When I come home from work now, especially after a hard day, I go to see what new mysteries the backyard has decided to unveil. Someone who lived here, at some time, loved and knew daffodils, and planted many types.

"They're the soldiers of spring," I said one morning, watching them wave in a chilly breeze.

"What?" said Sir UncMo.

They're the brave ones, the ones who barrel forth on a bleak landscape, giving hope to the rest of us. They show us the way, then are gone too early.

Not to make it too heavy, but really.

The daffodil enthusiast who lived here planted different varieties. Never knew there was such a thing as more than one kind of daffodil. The yard has at least five types, including one with a sunny orange cup, another miniature and screaming yellow, another almost white like the snow. 

(Silver Spring is a place where I live happily now.)

I also never knew, until this season, that daffodils could inspire wonderfully nerdy columns with prose like this:

"I simply require Millennium Perfection, a buttercup-yellow trumpet of form and substance that makes King Alfred (or Carlton) look like a weed."

The couple who sold us house told us it had been meticulously maintained by two surgeons (it's near a hospital). Whoever planted those daffodils gave us a gift that goes way beyond blossoms. Did he or she know that, while kneeling in the dirt, thinking of spring?

A daffodil is a palliative, a show piece, a conversation, and a window on time.

What Do You Want, I'll Give You What We Have.

You'd think from the lack of posting here that my life has been one unbroken boulevard of comfortable moments.

But oh no. What it's been is one unbroken boulevard of overwhelm alternating with laziness, a hearty helping of awkwardness sprinkled liberally throughout.

The exchange I want to tell you about took place recently in Glendive, Montana, about 220 miles outside Billings. There had been an oil spill into the Yellowstone River, which provides drinking water for the town.

It had been a long day covering the spill. No proper meal. The progression from Billings, roughly: wolfed-down chafer eggs, Garmin fail, hasty turn in rental car, cop lights, verbal warning from said cop, three hours of driving through wondrous sky sky sky land land land beige beige beige cattle horses coal trains, and finally muddy riverside tours of the spill scene with people who had been working far rougher hours with far fewer proper meals.

We just wanted food. And possibly an alcoholic beverage. My companion for the evening was a photographer and native Montanan who knew Glendive. There was a good Mexican place, she said. We drove to the main commercial strip, which sat in the shadow of a parked coal train on the railroad tracks. I entertained visions of melted cheese.

Mexico Lindo, as it turned out, wasn't open on Monday nights. Not much was, from the looks of it. The Beer Jug, however, had the lights on. We parked on the empty street.

The Beer Jug carried not exactly warmth, but an impression of warmth, though the pool table was empty and the only patrons were clustered almost out of sight at the end of the bar. It was cafeteria-like and bright, the bar backlit by refrigerator cases. The bartender asked what we wanted.

Now, I've been the chick who tries to order the fancy drink at the dive bar before. In another life. I knew better than to order anything that comes in a martini glass, even if I'd been inclined to. I knew to order a straight, bottled pour. That's it. "I'll have a glass of white wine, a Chardonnay if you have one," I said. Even saying "Chardonnay" was pushing it, I knew.




The bartender froze. "Um, we have like a pink zinfandel, but I don't know if you want that," she said. She had short blonde hair and appeared to be less than half my age, but she was plenty wise enough to know that I sure as hell did not want a pink zinfandel.

"This is the Beer Jug, after all," I acknowledged. Sadly, I don't love beer. "No problem, I'll just have a club soda," I said.

The bartender remained immobile. "Um," she said. "What's that."

She didn't wait for the answer and walked toward the refrigerated cases full of cans silhouetted in fluorescent light.

"We have beer, and we have pop."

Maybe it was the fatigue, or maybe just simple, blind hope, that made us somehow continue ignoring the options, which were blazingly clear at this point. "I'll have a vodka soda," the photographer said. Another stare. "We don't have hard liquor," the bartender said.

Unbelievably, we kept going. "What about a cider?" I said. My friend nodded supportively as the bartender continued to stare at us. "Yeah! Like a hard cider?"she urged me on.

The bartender continued to watch us, waiting it out. The slow-turning gear in my head finally clicked in. "You know what? I'll just take a beer. What beer do you like?" Tell me, blonde bartender, please tell me. I don't care as long as it is a potable beverage.

She poured a stout for me and an ale for the photographer. We ordered sandwiches and popcorn, which the bartender popped on a burner in front of us. "Can we also have some water? I asked.

Here, unexpectedly, choices: The bartender lowered her chin. "Do you want tap, or bottled water?" The tap water had been declared okay to drink just a few days ago after benzene contamination from the oil spill.

There were not two people in Glendive more enthusiastic about trying the local tap water at that point than us. "Tap water is fine with me! Fuck it! Yeah let's try the tap water! WHY NOT."

So we did. It didn't taste very good, but according to the people we talked to, the water in Glendive had never tasted very good, spill or no spill. It's chlorinated to hell and back because, among other things, "animals die in the Yellowstone River," as the bartender mentioned.

Still, I wanted to finish the water, to show somehow that I wasn't a hopelessly fussy outsider (why does it still occur to me even a little bit to care what a random stranger thinks of me or my beverage preferences?). Couldn't do it. Didn't really do justice to my BLT, either. That's OK. I'm not too fussy to have a beer and popcorn for dinner.



Music: "Go Back Home"

Nothin' Lasts Forever When You Travel Time.

On the regional jet from Chicago to Des Moines today, I encountered an in-flight rarity: a delightful baby. About nine months old, he had neat, wispy bronze hair, big blue eyes, chubby dimpled cheeks, and a ready smile made up of brand-new teeth all crowded into the front of his mouth. From the row ahead, he looked over his mother's shoulder and brightened at the sight of us, his new potential friends in 8D and E.

He was a welcome change from the whiny and unsatisfiable toddler who decided, as we taxied down the runway in D.C.,  that she did not "want to go up," repeating, "I wan drive Chicago." I sympathized with her at first, thinking, "Man, kid. I hope this flight proves your unreasonably premature fear of flying to be as absurd as it seems right now." 

But by the time we were on the ground in Chicago after a smooth flight and I had watched her calm father's every attempt to address various complaints be met with a constant, teary threat of tantrum, I felt nothing but gratitude for all my eggs that went unfertilized. The lady next to me tried to be nice and give her a comics section from the newspaper. "Can you say thank you?" the dad said.

The girl clutched the paper and stared back, vacant and unsmiling. You are one of those toddlers who takes things and, despite being urged incessantly to say please and thank you, will never say please or thank you, I judged silently. Maybe it was her parents' fault; maybe she was just crummy from birth; maybe she would become less crummy later on. I left those questions back at the door of the plane, where her stroller was being brought out from the luggage hold.

Our new baby friend, on the other hand: "How can you resist that smile?" said my seat mate, an older man who reached out and let the Superior Baby grasp his finger, to the endless amusement of both parties. "How can you resist that smile," he repeated to the baby. We couldn't: We were all on Superior Baby's side. He was so sweet that when he fussed, his seatmates looked for ways to distract him, and he allowed himself to be distracted. 

This is the beauty and the hell of domestic travel: Within the space of one short flight, any human—a baby, a 60-year-old, a fortysomething who is secretly 14 inside— has the capacity to embody his or her best (or worst) side. None of Superior Baby's poopy diapers and cranky days existed on flight 3347, just like all of Crummy Toddler's angelic sleeping moments and innocent kindnesses were invisible on the previous flight. Airports are one big morality play.

The man, who was slight with sun-speckled white skin and dark clothes on, gazed at Superior Baby's smiling face over the seat back and spoke in a low voice that I could hear, but was not necessarily addressed to me. "I could be looking at my son 28 years ago," he said, watching SB. "Same cheeks, same eyes...same nose, same dimple." He watched the baby for a little while longer, and over the plane engine I thought I heard a very small, bittersweet moan.

The baby sat back down on his mother's lap and the man nodded off. At the end of the short flight, SB popped back up to say hi. He looked at my seat companion first, then looked at me for an explanation. I made the "asleep" motion with my hands pressed to my cheek. He gamely accepted me as the alternative playmate for a bit, but lit up when the man woke from his nap. 

"He was waiting for you to wake up," I said. 

"What?" the man said, and leaned forward. 

"He was waiting for you to wake up," I repeated, and the boy stretched out his hand for their game.

--

Here are a few shots from Main St. in Ames, Iowa. Ames is the site of Iowa State, so I had expected a college-town feel, but based on my short visit I have to assume most of the student activity is centered on the campus itself. Main St. felt like the street that time (and hipsters bearing cocktails in Mason jars and other artisanal beverages) forgot.

Not a shop, but a center, not far from the Quilting Connection.

Best store name. Runner-up: It's All About Me.

No pants at the pantorium. The sign on the window said it was a radio station and inside there were some older guys chatting.

The best part about Ames so far is this radio station, on which I heard the items below.

Musics: "The Voyager" and "Beggining to End" (the latter of which, in case you're wondering, is a riff on this)