Yesterday evening I happened across some signature gatherers canvassing for registered voters who reside in San Francisco. While the sheer volume of such campaigns in the Bay Area, and the often misleading information they give about the cause they’re representing, I often decline as politely as possible and move on. But in this case, I actually walked up and volunteered my John Hancock. Why?

Because the volunteers were out working for The Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco. And before you jump to the conclusion that they’re right-wing nutjobs out to rename everything “Reagan this” and “Reagan that” (like I did when I first got an email from them), check out the site. Instead, it’s a gloriously involved piece of satire, the kind of well-planned joke that reminds me why I love The City.

See, they’re looking to get 10,000 signatures in order to qualify a ballot proposition so that San Francisco voters can decide if they want to rename the local Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant, which, to put it bluntly, processes the stream of shit flowing from our sewage system. And the president they want to bestow this honor upon is none other than George W. Bush.

I can only hope the proposition, as written, stipulates a sign reading “George W. Bush Sewage Plant” in a size proportional to the man’s heroic legacy. Preferrably with some dramatic lighting, or maybe even in neon. Complain all you will about the over-legislation of The City and the volume of seemingly vain proclamations from City Hall and ballot initiatives from motivated cranks, but this one has my full support.

I will do pretty much anything to add a new byline to the ol’ writing bio. I normally joke that I’m a byline whore, but whores get paid — whereas I’m willing to give it up for free, which I think makes me just a slut. Plus, I’m definitely motivated by compulsion and enthusiasm more than strictly money, so again, it’s fitting. On the other hand, whores can have lovers, not just clients, so there’s that. Guess I’d better avoid such loaded terms and just go with the more neutral “collector.” For this week I did get paid, and added a new publication to the list, so it’s like the best of all worlds.

• The People’s Guide: North Beach Blogged
• The People’s Guide: North Beach Blogged, Day 2
• The People’s Guide: North Beach Blogged, Day 3
• The People’s Guide: North Beach Blogged, Day 4
• The People’s Guide: Jackson’s Day 5 Doozie

Thanks to editor Sarah Hromack for the opportunity. She’s left the door open for me to contribute in the future, and I’ve been sitting on a project idea that my friend Jason and I have been discussing since last Summer that I think would fit well, so you may just see me pop up there again.

So I’m spending the weekend trying to accomplish as much as I can towards getting a rough cut of my student film Dominoes done. When editing, it’s always good to have at least a temporary music track to use as a timing reference. I’d also thought about adding music as background ambience — as though a radio were playing in the distance.

Of course, I’d never be able to clear rights to commercial music. So instead I dropped by ccMixter and used the search tools to browse for tracks tagged “hip-hop” that could be used freely with attribution. I turned up about ten choice tracks, of which I used five, and mixed them together using Traktor so that they segued seamlessly and maintained a steady tempo.

While you’ll probably barely be able to hear it in the film, I figured I’d post it here to let you in on my process as I’m working, as well as an example of the quality work that people publishing under a Creative Commons license so that it can be re-purposed by other artists.

Dominoes Mix [9.3mb MP3]

Featuring:

Slumlord by Lo Tag Blanco
Open Your Eyes (Long Island Remix) by CoffeeTrim
The Beat by CDK
Open Your Eyes (Elithrmix) by BOCrew
Martini Madness by DJ Blue

Looking through my bookshelf for something I hadn’t read a few weeks ago, I stumbled across Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. I have to say that as someone who has played writer and designer on the Web, it’s a life-changer I only wish I’d discovered earlier. The edition that ended up on my shelves (from where or whom I know not) is the 1997 printing. But it’s at least as timeless as Strunk and White, and Bringhurst’s poetic prose measuring considerations of reading on, and writing or designing for, computer displays are still quite apt. An excerpt, emphasis mine:

“The screen mimics the sky, not the earth. It bombards the eye with light instead of waiting to repay the gift of vision. It is not simultaneously restful and lively, like a field full of flowers, or the face of a thinking human being, or a well-made typographic page. And we read the screen the way we read the sky: in quick sweeps, guessing at the weather from the changing shapes of clouds, or like astronomers, in magnified small bits, examining details. We look to it for clues and revelations more than wisdom. This makes it an attractive place for advertizing [sic] and dogmatizing, but not so good a place for thoughtful text.

“The screen, in other words, is a reading environment even more fugitive than the newspaper. Intricate, long sentences full of unfamiliar words stand little chance. At text size, subtle and delicate letterforms stand little chance as well. Superscripts and subscripts, footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes disappear. In the harsh light and coarse resolution of the screen, such literate accessories are difficult to see; what is worse, they dispel the essential illusion of speed. So the links and jumps of hypertext replace them. All the subtexts then can be the same size, and readers are at liberty to skip from text to text like children switching channels on TV. When reading takes this form, both sentences and letterforms retreat to blunt simplicity. Forms bred on newsprint and signage are most likely to survive. Good text faces for the screen are therefore as a rule faces with low contrast, a large torso, open counters, sturdy terminals, and slab serifs or no serifs at all.”

If you’ve ever designed anything, from pages to packages, web sites to billboards, it behooves you to pick up this book. If you’ve ever written anything, and are curious about the history and the future of text, it behooves you to pick up this book. And if you’re just curious and want to read a master discourse deeply on a rich topic, it behooves you to pick up this book.

With water up to my waist and waves rolling in, I made the decision that I should go no further. I’d mustered enough courage to get over any immediate fear, but I was already cramping in the cold and I’m not a particularly strong swimmer. The decision I made not to dive in and swim further out was a rational one, as doubling the number of men struggling to keep from drowning wasn’t going to help anyone. I was helpless, and though I wasn’t responsible for any of it, I could sense the grief on the horizon, and I was making a conscious effort to numb the feeling.

When the surfer ran up I knew that if the man flailing sixty yards from shore hadn’t drowned already, he’d probably be alright. And the anxiety eased — I wouldn’t have to live with being the helpless bystander who looked on while someone drowned.

Let me now start from the beginning.

It was a beautiful day in San Francisco — grabbing my morning coffee, the warmth reminded me that spring had just arrived. Checking in with my friends Jason and Min Jung online, they had plans to go to the beach. I offered to take the bus and meet them, but they offered to pick me up, and as the afternoon was slipping away I agreed, eager to dip my toes in the sand and water.

It was a nice ride up Geary, with a stop at a market in Japan Town for snacks. Rounding the bend on Sutro Hill past the Cliff House has always been one of my favorite views — with the pastel row house on the left, punctuate by the windmills and the park, the broad expanse of the Great Highway and Ocean Beach running straight into the distance and the vast Pacific stretching off into the haze.

The sand was thick with beachgoers on the first warm Saturday of the year, and the typically strong winds were remarkably calm, though that meant there were few kites in the sky — my favorite thing on Ocean Beach is seeing the varried array of kites, from the colorful Chinese dragons to the huge yet acrobatic sails used by kite-surfers. Still, there would be dogs and people to watch, snacks to eat, and I’d brought a copy of Dubliners and a deck of cards, so I was happy.

We found a parking space rather easily, and the sand at the bottom of the steps from the parking lots was nice and warm. We walked to the water, and in my flip-flops I tested the temperature. Cold as ever (it never really warms up to anything remotely tolerable). Then we walked a few yards up the beach, but I didn’t really notice the couple at first, until Min Jung pointed to the man waving.

“Is he yelling help?” We weren’t sure what he said over the sound of the waves, but it definitely sounded like distress. A friend was on the beach, waving back, and he was only chest deep or so and on his feet, so he might be playing a joke to lure her into the water. But then he stumbled, and went down like a knocked-out boxer. I had already started to pull my phone and cigarettes from my pants pockets as Jason began walking towards him into the shallow water, still wearing his shoes.

When the man didn’t get up, Jason started running. I balled my coat up and handed it to Min Jung, running after him in jeans and a t-shirt, kicking off my flip-flops.

The man was on his back in about a foot of water, but breathing. He was wearing nothing but boxers and gym shorts. Jason and I pulled him by his arms until he became dead-weight. “Breathe, just breathe,” I told him. “Relax and breathe.” Once we had him on hard sand, I asked him if he could stand up. “Yes,” he said.

So I tilted him upright and lifted him up from under his shoulders. Immediately once we had him on his feet, he tumbled into me, and I almost went down but for Jason. We got his arms over his shoulders, and got him to dry sand, where his friend took my place. The man, so exhausted his speech sounded slurred, cursed her for waving back instead of getting help.

By that time two sheriffs had arrived on their quad-bikes. He collapsed at the feet of one, who quickly asked if there was anyone out there with him. He didn’t respond, so I repeated the question, closer and louder. We asked if there was anyone else out there, and it turned out there was. Almost immediately, Min Jung spotted him in the waves, much farther out than we found the first man.

The sherriff obvously wasn’t stripping down to run in, but he wasn’t stopping me, so now down to my shorts I ran out. It wasn’t more than a few yards in that the sands began to shift under my feet with the undertow, and I had to slow down. A few more yards and the waves started to slow me further. My shins began to cramp after a less than a minute, and I was breathing quick, short breaths because of the cold as I reached down and splashed water on my chest in the hopes of acclimating faster.

I dove into the next wave I faced, but as I surfaced, it hit me that it would be suicide to swim out after him. I got my footing again, and turned around to see two other men coming in after me on either side. I scanned the horizon, but it took me a moment to spot the other swimmer. When I did, I saw that he hadn’t made any more progress to shore — in fact, he seemed to be in the riptide and his head was barely above water, bobbing in the spray.

My thoughts turned to three surfers whom I’d seem as we were coming up the beach. They had wet suits and a flotation device, and were probably strong swimmers who knew the local currents. Could I get to them in time? I walked parallel to the beach, towards those surfers, tracking the head in the waves. Then was the moment of helplessness. All I could do was track him — and the other men who’d come in with me.

That’s when the young surfer arrived. “Is there someone out there?” “Yes.” “Where is he?” I pointed, “Straight in front of me is where I last saw him.” The surfer ran out and quickly began cresting the incoming waves on his board. My attention returned to the man who’d gone out further into the surf, the one in the polka-dot boxers — him I could still help if necessary.

I turned around, and Min Jung and Jason were waving me in, the sherriffs standing stoically at the waterline, a small crowd having developed. After a moment, checking the surfer’s progress, I ran to the closest sherriff, thinking to tell him about the other surfers further down the beach. “Search and rescue is on the way,” he told me when I got there, breathing heavily. Min Jung and Jason assured me that the first man was doing okay, and shortly after I looked back out, I could see the surfer, floating on his board and holding the second swimmer.

A fourth man had joined the other two strangers and myself who’d gone after the swimmer in our shorts. The man in the polka dot boxers had made it out. I let the three of them know that the rescuers were on the way. I watched, worried that the pair were still caught in the riptide, and if the young surfer could pull the man across the current.

Turning to walk back to shore, I heard the sirens on the fire trucks as they barrelled down Sutro Hill. In a couple of minutes, the surfer had made considerable progress toward shore. The firemen had arrived, but in boots and coats. Once the surfer into knee-deep water, the other three mean still out there helped hoist the man up into an army carry and walked him up to dry land just as the first surf rescuer in a wetsuit showed up.

The second swimmer was breathing, and at this point, there was nothing to do but get out of the way and let the professionals do their job. But I knew both of them would be fine, and said as much to Jason. The first swimmer was with his friend, under a blanket. The rescuers had turned the second on his side to keep him from drowning any water in his lungs. In five more minutes, both were loaded into trucks and off to the hospital.

I needed a cigarette, though there was a flash of guilt that my cigarettes were dry — what if one of the swimmers had died because I took an extra ten seconds to make sure my cigarettes stayed dry? The conversation between Min Jung, Jason and myself turned to reviewing the events and processing our emotions as we walked up the beach, looking for somewhere to sit down.

We walked up the stairs to the parking lot, and there another small scene had developed. A local cameraman was filming the rescue vehicles, and an officer in a white shirt and tie was directing everyone over the radio. I sat on the concrete and laid down, closing my eyes, crashing from the adrenaline. There was another flash of guilt when the thought occurred to me to introduce myself to the cameraman.

Eventually the commotion died down, and rested a bit, I suggested we celebrate “alls well that ends well” with some oysters at the Cliff House. But the cocktail menu had little to offer for Jason, a vegetarian, so we went to Louis’ instead — where the sight of the crusty sourdough and thoughts of slathering it with butter made me pretty much forget the oysters. We got a prime booth in the corner, with the Headlands lighthouse in the distance and the ruins of the old Sutro Baths below.

It was a fine meal. We all tore into the bread, which hit the spot, and Min Jung graciously let me steal a few scallops. Why hadn’t we acted sooner? Why hadn’t anyone else acted? How did our actions help or hinder, and was there anything more, or less, that we could have done? We came to some agreement that we had all played our own important roles. Jason was the first to commit to action. Min Jung quickly alerted a passerby on the beach to call the authorities. I’d judged the limit that the sincere but casual help a few strangers in shorts could offer wasn’t going to be enough for the second swimmer.

Later that night, I called my dad to thank him for all the lessons on marine safety, and my mother made me smile, calling me her hero. But we were all heroes in our own small ways. If someone has to be crowned with laurels, it should be the young surfer, since he was the one who snatched a drowning man from the sea.

I look forward to hearing the two swimmer are okay in the news somewhere. If there’s a lesson here that applies generally, it’s that you shouldn’t swim at Ocean Beach. Still, bring a towel. And don’t panic.

More from Min Jung.

For some reason, I’ve been garnering a few followers a week on Twitter lately, which is kind of insane, since my Twitter stream is pretty inane (especially the attempts to be profound). It’s gotten to the point where I have more than 400 followers, which is not to boast (a lot of my friends have many multiples more than that).

But a few months ago I pruned the list of people I follow back to only people I’ve met in person (with a few exceptions), and the number’s hovered around 150 ever since. While I could pretend to be all “Well, that’s the watershed group-size number cited by social network theorists,” really its because many of the people I follow are heavy users and that’s about the size of the information firehose I can drink from without drowning.

While I started to consider it, I won’t set my feed to private because I do like to share links and I have friends who follow my Twitter feed but aren’t actually users themselves (thanks to the RSS feed on my site). And if you really need to get in touch with me — say, about a story idea or a job offer — it’s not like there aren’t lots of other ways to reach me.

So yeah, it’s not that you aren’t different or special or deserving of my attention. If it’s any consolation, there are lots of folks I have met, do follow, and don’t follow me back. Which I agree kinda smarts, but we all have different levels of attention we can give to any one service.

Inspired to create my own by Ernie, collected here by Richard. Timetable via, rail map via, satellite map via.

Get it?

Every six months or so, I try to prune my list of RSS feeds that I subscribe to. Partly to delete dead feeds, or those that I don’t read, and partly to make sure feeds I want and need to read are grouped and stacked to make it easy on me to keep up.

Well, it’s been nearly a year, and since I’m prone to stumble on something cool, hit “subscribe,” throw it in a folder and move on, I’d managed to accumulate nearly 1,000 feeds. No one can keep up with all that noise! And, frankly, there’s a lot of echo in that chamber.

I couldn’t sleep tonight, so I figured why not take care of this mundane task. I have been using Google Reader for the last year, and I’d had issues with the subscription management page in the past. With 900+ feeds and the default display set to “all,” you can imagine the kind of server and client power needed to render that huge list in all its AJAX-y glory. Too much, it turns out, for Google to handle.

So I exported the OPML file of all my feeds and edited by hand in TextEdit. Good times. The problem is, to delete all my existing feeds and replace them with the new set of feeds and folders, I have to get into the “manage subscriptions” page that’s borking. I could set up a new account, but guess what — since Reader is tied to my Google account, I’d have to sign out and log in every time I went from GMail to Reader, for instance.

So I went back to Bloglines, and while I struggled with the regular version a bit, the Beta version worked great. The fact is, if you’ve got an assload of RSS feeds, Google Reader just can’t handle ‘em. I haven’t given up on the service — presuming I can get the settings page to work properly I will take a stab at re-uploading my new feed set — but they really need a feature to delete all subscriptions (possibly on import), if not manage multiple OPML files.

As luck would have it, my old friend Topaz is playing a show in New York the night before I leave town and in San Francisco the night I arrive, making me very, very happy and giving me excuses to say hey on either end of my itinerary.

Hell, maybe he’ll play guitar. I didn’t even know he could do that — that’s how good he is.

So my going away party is at the Lion’s Den in New York on Friday the 21st.

And my coming home party is at the Boom Boom Room in San Francisco on Monday the 31st (it’s spendy, true, but free booze for you tipplers).

Update: Due to popular demand, and a meager bank account, it’s looking like burritos in the Mish followed by a houseparty in the Dogpatch. Taqueria San Francisco at seven?

It’s 7:52 in the morning, and I haven’t slept in sixteen hours. I’ve got a journalism paper already two weeks late and a documentary proposal final due tomorrow, I have to present footage from my student film which looks worse and worse each retrospect to class in a few hours, and I have two physics books and have a dozen problem sets to plow through before the final test that will basically determine my grade in a week. And all of this to make good on the college degree I already spent about eleven semesters not getting the first time around.

I am fucked.

That, however, isn’t news to anyone who knows me particularly well. I seem to exist in a perpetual state of fucked-ness. This is what was on my mind as I walked down the block for a coffee and a lox bagel meant to be the special treat that gets me through what promises to be a shitty, anxious day — and that’s if it’s productive. The little Brooklyn nabe I’ve called home for the last few months was quiet and grey, with working people going about their business completely unawares of the coffee-sipping, cigarette-smoking walking crisis in their midst.

It was the perfect walk to make that kind of random mental connection that I’ve always taken unsubstantiated pride in: A scarily apt metaphor for the seemingly endless bouts with writer’s block I’ve been experiencing the last two years is Steve Sax Disease. Unlike Lou Gehrig (and if I’m anything, I’m unlike Lou Gehrig), this isn’t a tragic yet noble actual disease — Parkinson’s, in Gehrig’s case. No, instead it’s a mental block that makes what was once the simplest of tasks a neurotic torment, and makes the sufferer look like a complete buffoon.

A little background: Steve Sax Disease is actually a variation on Steve Blass Disease, but Sax Disease affects fielders while Blass Disease affects pitchers. In a pitcher’s case, it describes the onset of a sudden and sometimes complete loss of control over a thrown ball. A modern sufferer of Blass disease was the St. Louis Cardinals’ Rick Ankiel. It’s like a little explosion goes off inside a pitcher’s head, and suddenly a lifetime muscle memory honed to hit a catcher’s glove with a baseball from a little over sixty feet is completely forgotten.

Sax Disease is a more accurate portrayal of my own problem for a number of reasons. First, Sax played when I was growing up, and played the same position I did in Little League — second base. And as a fielder Sax had a number of other talents that didn’t suddenly disappear. For starters, he could still hit, which is probably what kept him on the perennially punchless Dodgers for years after the onset of his malady.

What would happen is that often on a routine play, Sax would field a grounder smoothly and then, with more than enough time to make the play, inexplicably throw it into the stands or the dugout instead of to the first baseman. The problem snowballed because, nervous that he’d make yet another throwing error (he racked up 30 in 1983) he would double or triple pump before throwing, or not even throw at all, and the runner would be safe at first.

This describes my difficulty getting started on a writing project perfectly. Sometimes, in a rush to write something, anything, I’ll miss the object of the exercise — making a point — wildly. Which has led to making fits and starts on stuff, and if not entirely happy with it giving up without doing much of anything at all. But there’s a twist to the Sax story that also mimics what I’ve been experiencing.

See, on a non-routine play, such as a bang-bang double play or a shot to the hole that tested his range, he had no trouble making the throw. Psychologists, especially of the Armchair Sports School of Psychology (not yet accredited) attribute this to the fact that Sax didn’t have time to think about what he was doing. His years of training took over and he was as automatic as a cat landing on its feet.

Again, there are times when something just sets me off and I can hardly keep myself from writing. Like this piece right here. I get an idea, I sit down, I write it, I send it to someone or post it online somewhere and I get a feeling like that which one gets on the field when one hears the smack of leather pill against leather mitt. It’s not always pretty, but it’s done, and there’s a bliss of relief.

Something happened along the way as a writer where at one point I was just writing because I wanted to, and because it came naturally. I didn’t want to become “a writer,” I just did it, because it was fun and I had something to say. But somehow I convinced myself, “Wouldn’t it be great to do this all the time, instead of editing catalog photos and copy for a national housewares retailer?”

And suddenly I found myself in a world where I spent more time thinking about the craft of writing, the profession or writing, the reasons to write one thing and not something else than actually writing. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve started to wonder if what I was doing before was even writing at all, because whatever I’m doing now isn’t nearly as fun.

It doesn’t seem to matter how often people tell me, “Hey, I like your work,” or, “That was great that thing you wrote” — which actually does happen more often now than it did when it all came easy. I’ve nearly killed myself trying to break blocks with booze and drugs, and have made efforts to appease, or at least annoy, the god or gods everyone seems so crazy about.

Oversleep, undersleep, overeating, undereating, exercise, repose, sex (with and without a partner), celibacy (intentional and unintentional), talking it out with my colleagues, my friends, my exes, my family, my therapist. You know the idiom “Banging my head up against a wall?” I have literally done that. I am, right now, trying to write out my writer’s block.

Instead of writing the papers that are due, or something I might get paid for, I have produced up to this point 1083 words relating my struggles to those of an above-average public professional who had the misfortune of becoming my go-to pop culture reference point for people who are paralyzed by “over-thinking it.” Which just goes to show that when there’s nothing on the line, I can make the play no problem.

Sadly, the time I could have actually turned this in for credit instead of something on-topic are long gone. So here it is, on my blog, because if there’s anything that will up the catharsis level (or at least win a few pity points) it’s flaying my psyche publicly. At least, that’s my hope.

The bright spot here is that Sax managed to lead the league in double plays, fielding percentage and set a record for singles in a season with 171 after leaving LA for New York in 1989 — six years after the first onset of symptoms. Hopefully I’ll manage my own little New York miracle and figure out how to get back to playing for the love of the game by the time I get back to San Francisco.