diggin your hood

When you live in a city, it’s hard to find a quiet place that’s devoid of people. In my neighborhood, you’ve got two options: the cemetery, or the polling place on Election Day.
If it’s not the first Tuesday in November, then the cemetery is where you want to be. It’s the perfect place to bring your girl for a picnic or to hang out and read a book. It’s got green grass, trees, bay views, and dead bodies. It’s romantic in the way that the civil war is romantic; it’s full of stories concerning uncompromised beliefs, families torn apart, glorious death, and men doing shots of whiskey while riding lawnmowers.
When I go to the cemetery, I’m usually surrounded by its residents, or hunched, white-haired, soon-to-be residents. Lately, though, I’ve been noticing a lot of outsiders. By that I mean “the living” who aren’t me or my girl. There’s the random group of goth kids who hang out and smoke clove cigarettes. They’re stereotypical and adorable. (I only wish that they’d mix the white face paint with some wrinkle goo for a more honest representation of death.) There’s the “fleet” of midlife crisis remote control plane operators who yell at each other when one of them breaks formation and “jeopardizes the mission”. These guys are annoying like a metal detector guy, but with an added overhead buzz. There are the notebook toting history buffs who try to dissect the lives of the residents by looking at gravestones. How would you like it if some corpse came to your house and tried to sum up your life by looking at the mailbox? (Another late mortgage payment. Another blow up doll.)
And then there’s the bagpipe guy. He started showing up a few months ago, practicing his discordant bagpipery for hours on end. He’s totally mocking the dead. Everyone knows that the delicate tissue of the lungs decomposes quickly, and the dead are sensitive about this loss. This guy doesn’t care. He throws it in their faces. He fills his powerful lungs with air and blows into a contraption that even looks lung-ish. It’s as cruel as playing Marco Polo with deaf kids. Hey douchebag-piper, take up the xylophone.
I guess my real issue with these visitors stems from my guilt at, once again, being part of the gentrification process. This situation feels all too familiar, except for the fact that this time it's taking place in a cemetary. When I first started coming here, I was one of only a handful of “the living”. It was a rough time to be in the cemetery. Corpses would roll up on me with that cocky rigor mortis swagger and yell, ”You wanna fuck wit me? Huh? Wanna go? I got no nerve endings, bitch!” Over time, I won their respect, and we learned to get along fine.
But now all the other living people see me kickin it out here and they think it’s cool. There are dudes from the suburbs coming in acting all tough, saying, “I’m OLD school skeleton like Lucy and shit.” These fools play at being dead just because it’s trendy. They don’t care about the dead as individuals, or what they’re like on the inside. (maggoty)
Next there will be cafes, art galleries, expensive restaurants, and baby strollers everywhere. Eventually, my neighbors will lose their cheap residences and begin to resent me. Then, just like what happened in Brooklyn and West Oakland, they will chase me down and try to eat my brains.
You can call me paranoid, but I’ve seen this process play out many times. The cemetery on the other side of town is so gentrified that everyone looks and dresses exactly the same. In that cemetery, there’s only one way to tell the living from the dead. The dead are still on Friendster.

the collection

When my next-door neighbors went out of town, I’d feed their cat. They’d hand over the keys and repeat the same feeding instructions that I’d heard two hundred times already. Maybe they assumed that my 12 year-old brain couldn’t retain the wet to dry food ratio, or maybe they saw me in my backyard trying to light metal on fire and figured I was getting dumber by the week. Either way, I’d get the tour of the water dish and litter box once again and then wait for Mrs. Cole to say, ”And help yourself to any food in the house.”
That was why I eagerly awaited the Coles’ sporadic weekend trips. Nutrition. When I say nutrition, I’m talking about chocolate chips, butterscotch crumbles, and sprinkles. Picture an ice cream cone with multiple toppings. Turn it upside down. This is what my food pyramid looked like.
My house had three kids in it, so the good food was always gone a day or two after it entered the kitchen. One shelf in the cabinet always seemed to have a box of taco shells and a box of ice cream cones on it and not much else. Sometimes, after a week of staring at ice cream cones with nothing to go in them, I’d spread a thick layer of butter on the inside of one, add a little sugar, and tell my taste buds to step up and be men. “Welcome to the jungle.” I’d say to them.
The Coles were retired with no kids in the house, so not only did they have food, but they also had delicate and mysterious objects displayed throughout their house. The wood paneled walls held shelves of small Greek statue replicas, novelty bottle openers, and the quite impressive “Presidential Plates: The Inauguration Series”. I’d wander their home in awe, eating spoonfuls of sprinkles to help fuel my curiosity.
One afternoon, after feeding the cat, I grabbed some potato chips out of the Coles’ cabinet and went into their living room, where I noticed an incredible new acquisition. On top of the television sat this tall glass box with a red rose suspended inside it. When I saw the power cord on the back, my palms began to sweat. What the hell could it do? I walked over, flipped a switch, and the rose began to slowly rotate while fiber optic lights filled the glass box with throbbing color. I was mesmerized by it’s mystery.
I sat down in Mr. Cole’s chair and stared at the rose as it spun around in the tranquil light. I leaned back and ate potato chips. I pretended to be Mr. Cole. I surveyed the wall of framed photos of my children and grandchildren. I looked back at the rose and thought about the years gone by. I put my feet up on the footstool and ate more chips. The rhythmic light from the rose relaxed me and I let my hand gently drop onto the table beside the chair. I felt a cold, porcelain bowl in the center of the table and ran my finger around its bumpy rim. The rose went red to green to yellow as my finger dropped into the bowl and stirred its contents. There were little, hard pieces of something in the bowl. Without looking, I picked a few up and rubbed them between my fingertips. They felt like old, dried out sunflower seeds. Turning my head slightly, I finally looked down to see that the bowl was completely full of chewed-off fingernail pieces. Horrified, I yanked my hand back, knocking the bowl to the floor and sending fingernails flying.
The rest of that day is one long repressed memory.

Library Experiment Number One

I walked into the library, slid open a card catalogue drawer and pinched a slim stack of yellowed cards between my thumb and pointer finger. I wrote down those titles in a little book.

Oakland Main Public Library
Local History card catalogue
17 cards from drawer “Well-Whit” in reverse order. No skips.

Where the Trail Winds Down
Where the Mission Shadows Fall
Where Once the Thrushes Sang
Where Life is Life
When Zephyrs Blow
When the Snows Drift
When the Overland Comes In
When the Moon on the Lake is Beaming
When the Baby Died
When Phyllis Walks with Me
When Phyllis Plays
When My Ship Came In
When I am Tired
When I am Gone
When I am Dead
When Almonds Bloom
Whelplay, James Davenport “If Canada Were to Annex the United States”

climbing invitation

Hey Greg,
Thanks for the climbing invite. I'd like to say yes to the trip, but everything I know about climbing comes from the wrapper of a Clif bar. I know about the rope, the little pouch with some stuff in it, and the funny shoes. Oh, once I saw a movie where a climber's fucktard partner cut the rope and the poor guy crashed into an ICE CHASM! Didn't even attach a note to the cut part of the rope so that the crumpled guy underground could at least read an apology, like maybe "Sorry about the rope thing. Keep yer chin up." So I guess I'm asking whether I'd have to quit my job and start training now for this, or what?

I feel that I must reiterate my shortcomings with a quick list.

Things I DON’T have:
climbing rope
little metal climbing things
climbing shoes
lycra shorts
knowledge of climbing
practical experience in climbing (ladders being an
exception)

Things I DO have:
sunblock
bicycle helmet
upper body strength
the will to live

all best, kyle

Shadows of Communists

In Slovakia's High Tatras, the trails are meticulously built with jigsaw rocks. This jagged surface begs you on and up into craggy cliffwalks. If you spit over the edge, you'll hit clouds. As far as we can tell, the Slovak people hike these trails until the day they die. The average age of hiker we saw was probably 55 or 60. We even passed a cheery white-haired retiree with climbing rope strapped to her pack. Sometimes, a group would pass by singing songs in Slovak. They’d be pitch perfect and I'd be out of breath. They’d sing to soothe my screaming calf muscles.
We spent a night in a hut on top of the mountain. Pilsner on tap-no joke. Some poor guy has to haul the keg up on his back. Beer is important here in Slovakia. And wine. And dancing, singing, spinning your wife around until she crashes into a table. Slovaks get wild in that old, old school way. (Like before they even had schools.) Out of control traditional dance in a late night restaurant looks something like a mosh pit without the teen angst. Two other things about Slovakia:
1. Garlic Soup
2. Huge trout grilled and spiced and slapped on your plate whole.
Can't explain further or the drool will destroy my keyboard.
We board a train towards Nizne Ruzbachy, where my great-grandparents are from. Two stops later, a group of Roma board(gypsies). The Roma people are a disenfranchised part of the Slovak population who do much of the manual labor and live in squalor. When they board the train, the stench of old body odor and vodka fills the car. Young kids who should be in school are swigging vodka handed to them by toothless fathers. Gambling ensues.
Young Roma kids have this eerie begging style where they chant in a soft, monotone voice while holding a crooked hand out for change. They follow you for way too long and stick way too close- always with the same unnerving chant. It's kind of like having a temporary poltergeist in your backpack which will fish through your pockets if you're not careful.
The Roma are dark skinned, and regardless of the countless hard working guys we saw building houses and digging ditches, enough of them steal and scam for most of the country to believe, as a Slovak 20-something on the bus told us, "White good, black bad."
Nizne Ruzbachy is tiny and beautiful, with little hills surrounded by farmland. The old church in the center of town is a source of pride and has been meticulously restored. Not a single restaurant or hotel or easy way out of town can be found. Rivkah approaches an old Slovak man with my family tree and he puzzles hard over the names, but shakes his head "no" after pronouncing each family name. A tractor, driven by an old man, comes barreling up the street. It's pulling a beat up wooden cart with another Slovak man in it who's holding some hand tools. Our guy waves the tractor down and and the cart rider jumps out to join the discussion. They go back and forth over the names, underlining my mom's perfect handwriting with their leathery hands, but still reach the same conclusion. No one from my family still living in town. They send us on our way towards the cemetary, where we photograph stones, a fair number of which have my great-great grandmother's maiden name on them.
We ride through Hungary, eager to get back into a big city. Budapest throws us together with a girl who organized an art festival which is taking place in a bunch of retail spaces that are in-between leases. She takes us around to some of the opening parties, and though there are only like 3 or 4 people at each, she considers it all to be hugely successful. We finish
the night in the bomb shelter basement of an anarchist collective, watching short films projected onto a makeshift screen and hearing about life under communism.
The Budapest art scene felt like an enthusiastic small-town scene dropped in the middle of this huge, old city. Maybe it shouldn't have suprised us, but where we expected an explosive reaction of art and music to the recent communist past, we found a handful of dedicated people slowly building the infrastructure to allow an explosion to someday happen.
Our last day in Budapest was spent on the outskirts, in a park where all of the communist sculptures were dumped after the Fall. Massive revolutionaries wave flags over your head while Lenin looms in the distance. That night we went out with some German guys to a culture club where this ageless beauty mc'd the night's events. A liberty-spiked Hungarian leans over to tell Rivkah that this woman fronted the most influential anti-communist band in Budapest back in the 80's. Our new German friends then tell us that a small Berlin wall still exists in everyone's mind, and that communism's departure was 60% good, 40% bad. Capitalist culture is making it impossible for them to get a pretty girlfriend...but seriously, they are quite concerned about all the focus on material goods. One of them mentions that his parents were both Stasi (the German secret police). When I asked him what they thought of the fall of the Berlin Wall he says it was never once discussed in their home.
On to Prague, a very accommodating city for late night tourists. Prowling around the castle grounds close to midnight, Rivkah is nearly impaled by a line of 3 uniformed guards marching through the darkness with their rifles and hats. We definitely had that breaking and entering feeling even though it's all perfectly allowed. We get sketchy directions to an old cemetary that reportely gets hit often by graverobbers. Countless ivy-covered tombs are broken open, revealing dusty coffins stacked on wooden shelves. The occasional tossed in wallet or passport indicates that this place is definitely not for late night tourists.
Oakland nurses our jet-lagged heads back to health and the pile of strange coins that dump out of my backpack make me feel like a pirate waking from a fever dream. Europe was impossibly great, and now we have to figure out how to get back...

Train to Hel

We took a late train to Hel. As it screeched along the peninsula in northern Poland, the baltic sea reared up on either side of us. Fisherman and laborers got on and off as we made our way to the very tip. We accepted a room from an old woman who brought us into communist-style block housing and delivered us to her son, whose place we'd be staying in. None of them spoke English, not even the man's 12 year old son, Oscar. Pantomine ensued. Toilet handle jiggling, tooth brushing, "Where's a restaurant?" belly-rubbing mime style stuff. The guy eventually turns on the tv for us and Bugs Bunny blares in polish until we figure out the off button.
We dine in an incredible seafood restaurant surrounded by pieces of ship and nautical equipment. The locals sing along to the sea shantys. That kind of place. Half way through dinner, an air raid siren tears through the music. It's so loud, coming from across the street, that we cover our ears. A short wave radio crackles to life, bringing a strong polish voice to the mix. It seems to be giving instructions. Rivkah and I start looking for the evacuation to start. Or the smoke to start billowing. But the music just gets louder and the people start talking more with their hands. This eardrum-piercing insanity goes on for a full minute or more and then just stops. No one spoke English out there so who the hell knows...
After a beach day on the Baltic, we head to Krakow and rent an apartment for a few nights. The touristy area is way to annoying to deal with, so we end up spending most of our time in the old Jewish part of town. It's crumbly and beautiful. We spend a night drinking incredible Polish vodka with an anarchist/actor/book publisher/tavern owner who talks with us well into the night. He fills us in on recent Polish political events. There's definitely a lot of discontent here right now amongst the younger Poles. The government, run by twin brothers, is beholden to the Roman Catholic church and things appear to be quickly swinging to the right. Homophobia is on the rise, religion is being taught in schools instead of gym and art, and some claim that the climate of conformity is starting to resemble communism.
Kuba, the anarchist, has a condom machine in his bar. It's the only one in Krakow. It's a big contraption-I banged my elbow on it trying to move around in the tiny bathroom. When I comment on it, he says that the condom supply company/machine repair guy went out of business a year and a half ago. The machine is broken and empty- he now has it up only as a symbol of defiance against the church.
We left Krakow after a heavy final day at Auschwitz. In one room sits a massive pile of luggage that once belonged to some of the Jews who were put to death here. Big white letters spell out ANNI METZNER on one.
Just rolled into Slovakia this morning. We're in the Tatras mts., 20 minutes away from where my great-grandparents lived. It feels pretty incredible to be here. We're renting a guest room from an older Slovak couple. A plaque on the side of the house proclaims that Pope John Paul II spent the night once. We ask and it turns out to be true. The man's father was visited by the Pope in 1971 and he slept in the same room we are staying in. In the "brush-ups with fame" category, does that score more points than my previous high score of riding an elevator alone with Dr. Ruth? I think so. Tommorrow we start a two day backpacking trip through the incredible Tatras.

Berlin to Gdansk, Poland

We woke last night to a heavy knocking on the sleeper car door. The train had stopped, but I hadn't noticed until that moment. Before I could even open the door, a man in full military garb popped it open and started speaking some fast as hell Polish. Confused, I finally understood the word "passport" and scrambled for the backpack, whacking my head in the process. I laughed. We all laughed. Pain is an international language I guess. He taught us how to say "Thank You". Polish people are so goddamned nice.
We're way up in Northern Poland in the town of Gdansk. A lot of the buildings were built in the 1300's so of course they're incredible. Bombed-out neighborhoods still exist on the outskirts and we've explored one of those. There are 3 or 4 massive churches here, and at noon the bells battle for sonic dominance. Gothic mash-up. We're hoping to catch a boat to Hel in a few hours. Hel is a small fishing/beach town jutting out into the Baltic Sea.
Berlin was really fun, especially in the neighborhoods where Germans and Turks are living amongst each other. We were hanging out at a bar one night when some Turkish religious services got out, spilling big families of traditionally dressed Turks into the street. The scene quickly became small pockets of beer-drinking German hipsters awash in a sea of headscarves. Beautiful.