5.01.2026 - Weekly Digest

Hey it's one of these again.
-ja

M 4.27 Cranberry Faceblast Extreme
To live can to can on a wooden rail. Dream of The West. Oldest park in San Francisco and I almost know the names of some trees by now. You can go straight up the side and stumble onto some mulchy paths here and there or wind around on the paved parts or some combination insowich thereof. A stranger is already here taking in the sights and majesty. You can pull out a notebook and sketch the Big Orange Bridge aka the BOB if you want and not feel self conscious around the kids doing the same thing in their flared jeans. Folks come up here to plan weddings and practice breathing. Out of sight just below someone consumes the contents of a pressurized can and smashes it and places it in a column like those carefully balanced rocks we used to see on the logging roads in Ontario as a reminder if you can't see people they're sometimes here anyway.

T 4.28 Beer Light Mexico
Every day I think I feel the earth shaking and the times when it's actually happening I'm asleep and my brain tells me something else is going on, an animal or a meteor strike, and the only sensory processing that takes place is usually a loud crack in the corner, the building jostled out slumber. They built these houses, a lot of them, the old Victorians, after the Big One in '06, they built them out of redwood so they can bend and stretch and dance the way I used to on the Blue Line in Chicago out of boredom, those rare spurts when the train would actually go fast and you're hurtling through the tunnel in the dark, that's when you take your hand off the pole and bend your knees and rock with the rise and fall and uneven acceleration of inertial frame and whatnot. Like surfing which I see folks doing out here pretty often and refuse to imagine even trying myself. Now when I'm in this chair I'm in a lot I'm pretty sure I feel the trembling of the inertial frame and I think it can't be, it's gotta be the chair just moving around of its own accord or my organs pumping wildly enough to make everything bounce around a little and then it's easy to just throw it all into the box with the cliches from high school physics like when you push down on the shaky earth the shaky earth pushes back on you.

W 4.29 Green Apple-eptic Seizure
All these books about the City I've been reading. Probably time for another set of reviews. When I graduated from First College one of the nerdlier pleasures I discovered was associative reading, the pleasure in not having to funnel all of one's thoughts into a thesis or a theory or a premise, to just let the ideas pass through you like water through a water-dwelling organism. Did I mention I stopped looking things up when I write these? It's my lazy attempt at a kind of honesty, to put my ignorance on display, like that theory I saw about how a stack of unread books works as a totem to remind yourself of everything you don't know. None of these books I've been reading, the novels or the histories or the essay collections, none of them have mentioned this park, even though it's this old, even though it's been here since before Golden Gate which is right down the street, even though it's taller than anything in that one, the big manicured experiment where they tore down mile after square mile of sand dunes to terraform the joint with its own set of private trolley lines so the aristocratic types would have the ocean and the sequoia saplings all to themselves. None of them. It's like having a secret in plain sight.

Th 4.30 Enigmatic Drift
No idea what that last can says. It's probably a cryptic message and if I want to know more I have to pick it up which means I have to touch it and say a prayer against typhus then I'll need to de-crumple the thing so I can read whatever it says and it will probably say Blueberry Banana Chest Wound followed by visibly scrolling encoded text that requires a device of some kind to decipher, so I'll take it down the side of the hill which, if I may say so, is a decent sized hill and in my unqualified opinion as an amateur topographer I think it should be considered for junior mountainhood, as I also made myself familiar with the heap and heft and shape of Mount Tabor when I lived in Portland and I don't think without looking it up that that venerable mound is too many much more feet over the level of the sea. Just sayin', give a hill some credit. We're not astronomers. Nobody cares if a hill is a hill or a mountain is a mountain. We used to call piles of sand next to gravel pits hills in Michigan and nobody stopped us.