What I did on my Spring vacation.

There are people who aren't white in San Francisco. 

And, despite the salt-frosted wind coming off the Presidio, the new style for young Asian and Latin girls is to wear soft cotton hotpants in garish colors with huge fuzzy boots and put their hair in pigtails. I walked into a man on the BART, grinning like a cheese-stuffed retard at a trio of girls- indeterminate soft cacao race- their legs as bare as my squishy thoughts.

Chewing on legs- is frowned upon?

So two and a half hours after debarking at SFO I made it cross and through to San Rafael, gateway to the wake. Cochran picked me up and Honda-whisked my backpack and I to the dugout, where guys in hats with the stickers still on them stood around and glared at one another. I was attacked by Keoni the Hawaiian surfbear and Warner for a minute, in which time a small group of guys in hats with the stickers still on them gathered around me and murmbled threateningly.

I suppose I was slamming Keoni into the wall of the log cabin in glee, and they had never seen me before. I picked up the pieces of my pink cellphone (thanks Cindy) and put them back together. Anywho, after a few hours of carbombs and listening to Dirty say everything at the top of his lungs, I was acclimated, and I stood around and glared at people. I was home.

They all had their hair cut under those hats, and this made my brain itch. I got a SF hat from someone and proceeded to draw a sticker on a bar napkin. I put my brilliant drawing on the bill of the hat and then poured beer over the whole contraption- to make the napkin stick, you see.

Whoever it was took their hat back. Philistine.

Lucy, God love her, had two new tattoos, one on top of the other, that completely belie her beauty. Some bugfuck jailturd with a gun had layed down two rubber duckies with cigars and middle fingers up, in lines that had me remembering Steve-O being tattooed in a Hummer.

Umm....Black Flag lives.

I told her how hideous they were, and she explained that her father had invited this guy over on her birthday and gotten her tanked as Exxon before unleashing the 'artist' on her. Thanks a fuckbag, pops. You've ruined the finest ribcage this side of the Mississip.

As we were leaving, some indeterminate hour before dawn, Cochran got flustered (as he will), and ran over Dirty and some ParkadeRat with his car. No, seriously- I was in the car, and Mike hadn't been drinking for three or four hours. People seemed to be crowding his car, he said, and this made him nervous.

So nervous he clutched in and floored the gas, folding Dirty into the redwood bark and gravel like a marionette. Hot cocksmoke, he leans out the window, yells: WHAT WERE YOU DOING ALL UP ON MY CAR? and drives off, his face twitching in a panic attack.

Unable to believe this had just happened, I leaned out the passenger window and yelled his name and phone number and some choice things about his character, pushing his panic attack into apoplexia. I settled back and listened to him boil over, my work was done.

As a note, Matt Borello once convinced Cochran he had hit a homeless man and kept driving (in the Tenderloin) after he had smoked enough pot that he broke down crying and sweating and shaking and praying instead of pulling over and checking his bumper for mouthwash and beard. He can be a tad unstable, you see. Love the guy, but he's unstable.

After some three hours of sleep and spilling beer on Mat Hockett's bed, we rose and had breakfast. Fuck. Marin County- my plate of two pancakes, an overeasy egg, sausage links and sourdough toast cost $16. No shit. $16. 

Ty explained to me that the climate and elevation are some of why the sourdough is so lovely in San Francisco, but that the sourdough molecules actually build up in the air and paint and spiderwebs in a bakery that bakes it, and the sourdough improves year by year, its ancestral fug oppressing it from the air, pushing it to new levels of yummy. Far out...

Hockett sez Hey Chris, you wanna try my rope swing?

Do I!

We climb up through banana slugs and Hockett's treecreatures he builds from bones and twine and hangs around to scare Christians and other gentle creatures. I insist on going first. . Foot in loop, hefty leap out over the slope-

I open my eyes twentyfive feet downhill, one leg beneath me, wrapped in webbing and logs. My arms are scraped up, my ankle is twisted. The sunlight is really very pretty through the branches overhead. It is utterly silent. I look up and Mat and Ty are holding their mouths beneath enormous eyes, and I know that Hockett must have come out in the night and sabotaged the swing so that he could kill me and keep my oversized genetalia for one of his sick projects. Once I start cursing at him they snap out of it. 

The webbing didn't break. His knot didn't come untied. The two pieces of the knot stayed in form and left eachother. The ropeswing just didn't like me, that was all. 

KITEBOARDING! Without the board!

Hockett bought these two enormous kites, anchored to you by an arm cuff and a bar you yank at to steer, and the wind tries to pick you up and impact your vertebrae some thirty or forty feet away. It is more fun than Tetris, although I was kind of slow from smoking Trainwreck and kept crashing my kite. Jerm and Warner were pros right away, it seemed, inured to the cognitive-wrecking effects of hydroponic fluffydangdangDrool. We ate cheese and bread and avocados, and then we went a half mile down the beach and built an honest-to-Mohammed HOUSE out of driftwood. This was no shelter. Mat dug the support poles down a few feet and I found fresh wet ocean plants washed up and tethered the treelimbs together at every joint. The sun baked them and the rubbery cords contracted as they dried. Warner made a dragonhead mastpiece and leaned LONG whole trees against the roof like drunken masts. Jerm lay around and drank my wine.

The roof sat eight feet up, and when she was all lashed together, I climbed the thing and jumped on it and swung around and it didn't collapse on Warner, who was studiously fitting sticks into the walls to break the wind. We drank a bunch of beer and built a fire in there and all got smokesick from being forced too close to it, and then we left.

I love that house. Love.

Once Hockett was safely in bed we hit Peri's for some girl's birthday party who kept propositioning me in a voice like a hobo brakeman's. She had everyone spank her, and danced some. Chloe was there, and wondered where her boyfriend was. Mat looked pretty sick when he left us, and she was mad that he went to bed. Then we danced a lot and I overtipped the bartender, who sold Ryan Scott and I some sixpacks at last call. Well, actually, Ryan came and said:

She's going to sell us some beer.

Me: I like beer.

Ryan: So you want some beer.

Me: Indubitably.      We go up to the bar, and she produces sixteen Budweisers, and Ryan says:

Pay the lady!

Me: What?

Ryan: You said you wanted beer!

So I paid the lady, and the beer was put into a fancylooking bucket in some kid's trunk. As Ryan argued with a girl with funnylooking ears (We are going to your house, Sue! That is where we are going!) I grabbed the funnylooking bucket and ran the two miles to Hockett's house with the beer.

Haha! HA! I am mean. 

Ryan's voice trailed me for the first two hundred feet, up to the baseball diamond: 'OC! Oooooh Ceeeeee, cooooome baaaaack! That's his buuuuuuucket!' Haha! Ryan Scott is the best trumpet player ever. HE is a maniac of trumpeteering. I am still mean.

Bucket! As an aside, it really was some kind of Scifi Bauhaus bucket, all pleasing lines, possibly made for Paris Hilton to shit in when she must go camping.

The next day I found my friend Matt Borello quite by accident at a bus stop and got to catch up. I miss him. We once spent six whole months playing SKATE on a bald deck on his trampoline in the redwoods, the blue herons mating overhead and making tremendous noise as they littered the loam with their beautiful feathers. Wild turkey up there too, and mountain lions. We would drive out to the Inkwells once we were out of Budweiser and I would proceed to dump ALL of the fresh beer into the deepest well, 20 ft. down amid a mess of old trees, before Matt could stop me.

That fucker is cold, and we'd have to dive and search for each beer. Matt hated this game, which made it even more fun for me. And no one ever drank our beers, because we'd point down into the waterfall-fed hole from the rocks far above and inform them they had to dive for it. No jumping. Jump and I'll club the beer back out of your hands into the icebox below. Dive. I miss Matt.

Anyhole, I had to switch to a later ticket because of traffic on the bus, and now I am home. That is what I did on my spring vacation.