June 2003

What’s that old line about how sometimes the fears of paranoids are real? Well, I know I’m a bit demented. Certainly there’s ample evidence. But it may be jumping the gun to accuse me of delusions of grandeur. Here’s the situation, you be the judge:

For the past couple of weeks, San Francisco has experienced summer with a vengeance, by which I mean a seemingly uninterrupted cold wind off the ocean bringing with it daily overcasts that barely burn off even in the middle of the day and make it unwise to venture from one’s home without a coat.

Yesterday, I announced that I would be going out this morning and purchasing multiple flats of berries and conducting jelly testing all day today. Over a hot stove.

Consequently, dare I say, this morning dawned bright and clear and still. No fog. No wind. Shirt-sleeve weather. I went to the market for the first time this year without a coat, and just as I got there at 11:00 the Ferry Building clock performed a stirring rendition of the Westminster Chime and sounded the hour. What I really must do is memorize the words and sing them joyously and full-throatedly the next time I’m down there and the clock plays the chime.

Lord through this hour

Be thou our guide

So, by thy power

No foot shall slide.

Bong, bong, bong, bong…..

Then again, considering how my foot has slid….

As I swooped down upon Moua’s beautiful young okra and Bruin’s Brandywines I experienced perspiration. As I gathered nectarines from four vendors I wiped my brow. When I spotted the first haricots verts (painstakingly labeled “Haris Coverts”), I was gasping for breath although that may have been the signage.

By the time I got all this stuff plus some cherries, squash, onions, almond butter, and flats of tayberries and raspberries halfway back to my car on Drumm Street I was nearing heat stroke.

When I stopped at Safeway on the way home to pick up some canning jars and some dill for pickling the Coverts, the parking lot was broiling in the sun. In Safeway, I found the dill, $1.49 for a miserable sprig but not one of the vendors at the Ferry Plaza had any, so what could I do?

Well, I came home and napped all afternoon. It was too hot to work.

Have I talked about my late-winter toy? No, not the Segway. This was just before the Segway, sort of a warm-up. I had read with great enthusiasm Jeffrey Steingarten’s It Must Have Been Something I Ate. Steingarten observes, regarding those folks who avoid the skin of chickens for fear of the fat it contains, “If you can’t stand the skin, stay out of the chicken.”

During his chapter on the development of the perfect pizza-cooking technique, Steingarten mentions acquiring a Raytek Minitemp non-contact thermometer, using as an excuse his need to closely monitor the temperature of his oven.

I somehow glossed over this instrument in my excitement in reading of Steingarten’s gourmandizing. But then somewhere else I ran across a mention of it and did a little Internet shopping and in no time at all for a mere hundred bucks or so had one of my very own.

We all know it’s just a guy-gadget thing, but it’s so much better when you can spin the acquisition as a practical necessity. Like this morning when I gathered myself together and went on an adventure downtown to the Grand Restarting Ceremony for the recently-restored, original, turn-of-the-twentieth-century clockworks in the Ferry Building. I stuck my vehicular handicap placard in the exterior breast pocket of my field jacket, not wanting to get hassled for riding the Segway on the paved concourse area in front of the Ferry Building, since it might be construed as a sidewalk and the Supes have made it illegal on sidewalks even though I can legally take an electric wheelchair capable of the same speeds and weighing several times as much onto the sidewalk.

Well, nobody hassled me. And having that placard partially in sight attracted large numbers of folks my age and older who had disabilities or were developing them and were interested in the Segway as an aid to mobility. I told ’em all about the woman in front of the cheese store on 24th Street and dilated upon the practical aspects of zipping around the city darting in and out of traffic at 12 MPH balanced on a 13×16″ platform eight inches above the asphalt.

But yes, the Raytek. The best use of the Raytek by far I’ve found is to aim it at the heart of a visitor and pull the trigger. He sees the red light of the laser pointer and knows that he’s been somehow zapped. Then I tell ‘im his temperature and say, “The next setting is Stun… don’t make me use that.” They know, of course, I’m just kidding…of course. But then, it does have a distinctly weapon-like look to it.

Everyone relaxes when I point out its practical uses. Like for example just aiming it at any window to take the temperature of the inside surface of the glass, which you can use to instantly estimate the exterior air temperature without bothering to go outside.

The clock, by the way, is big and loud, qualities we appreciate in clocks on towers.

After a breakfast of toast with a whole stalk of young green garlic sautéed in duck fat with a couple of bites of leftover duck breast and three eggs, I Segwayed out to mail packages and stopped at Bi-Rite and picked up, among other things, a quart of Strauss Organic Low Fat Chocolate Milk since I had never tasted this brand. It was so tasty that I chugged half of it right out of the convenient glass bottle immediately upon returning home.

I hadn’t thought about it, but a real selling feature of the glass containers is that they have a much better mouth feel than does the spout formed when you open a cardboard carton. Hard to get your mouth comfortably onto those pointy things, but with a glass jug I get a good seal that will prevent more of the spillage stains that have built up on the floor in front of the refrigerator. Actually, the seal was so good that I had to go back in there a few minutes later and test it again, finishing the jug off in the process.

I must say that I experienced a great deal of oral satisfaction, of a kind that I’d not really had previously since cardboard milk cartons came into prevalence before I got old enough to be so depraved as to drink directly from the milk jug.

But wait, I just remembered that night in the ninth grade when I had padded into the kitchen, removed the water jug from the refrigerator, and was about to pour myself a glass of water when I suddenly realized that a Great Labor-saving Shortcut was available when Mother was not in the kitchen. Tastes better that way, too, being one step closer to the source.

Mother never caught me guzzling from the jug. I was a pretty stealthy kid.

But back to the chocolate milk. After I finished it, I hardly had room for lunch except for a quarter of a smoked eel, three nectarines, and a double handful of Brooks cherries.

I just flashed on what’s wrong with me. Why I’m so voracious now and go into binges of eating. It’s because I’m not smoking. Hell, I keep forgetting that I stopped smoking sometime back in February! I would never have imagined being able to write that sentence, but it’s true. It was on the 3rd that I got the test results confirming that the doctors were just kidding back in December when they told me that I had lymphoma, and I distinctly remember not having to go to all the trouble to go outside on cigarette breaks during the Siebel Open, which started on the 10th. So sometime during that week I admitted to myself that I no longer had an excuse to smoke, dammit, and stopped again.

(See, when they told me I had lymphoma, I was so delighted to finally see dark at the end of the tunnel that on the way home from the hospital I got the taxi to stop at a convenience store for a pack of cigarettes and joyfully resumed smoking.)

Yesterday afternoon I experienced a sudden rush of nicotine craving and it took me a couple of minutes to recognize the feeling for what it was since it happens now so infrequently. How strange it is.

People say that if they had their choice, they’d prefer to die suddenly of a massive heart attack or stroke. I just thought of a better way: If they still come with a last cigarette, I want a firing squad.