spring in the bay! - bay and palo alto.

so as mentioned, i've been slowly running around the bay taking pics. i'm trying to avoid the really obvious tourist shots and angling more for stuff i see in my daily life that i think are cool, and/or places and things i really like that i don't think a lot of people know about. this first batch comes mostly from the palo alto area.

let's start with this spooky-ass pic i took while going over the dumbarton bridge one morning in the fog -- i had just left my best friend's place up in the alameda and was heading down to stanford to duck quickly into work.



the bay area is usually very rainy in the spring. it was about 8am that morning and everything was fog, mist and rain. the picture actually somehow makes things look a little clearer; in real life you could barely see the arc of the bridge over the bay. this view's looking west from the east bay side of the bridge, toward the peninsula.

there are actually a lot of estuaries in the bay area. most of them are preserves where waterfowl will nest at various points in the year. there are hiking trails there; however, in the springtime they pretty much turn to mudbaths due to rain.

one year i actually went there to fly kites with some friends (silly childish pursuit, i know!) and lost the kite when the string broke. while trying to chase it down, i crossed what LOOKED like a dry stream-bed ... except it was about 1" of dry mud over two feet of wet. so when i started to cross, i sank in to my knees. the worst thing is it happened so fast my instinct was to get out -- so i took like 2-3 more steps and ended up losing my shoes in the mud. i had to dig them out with my bare hands. in the end i was literally black with ice cold, stinking mud.

i remember later on that day we went to eat sushi. prooobably not the best idea, considering my hands -- that had been wallowing in mud that smelled like sulfur and other forms of lovely anaerobic decay -- were now being used to eat raw food. unsurprisingly, i had a bout of stomach flu that night.

anyway! on that note! here are the lovely baylands. PLEASE NOTE: that is actually snow on the east bay mountains. this happens very rarely, as those mountains are no more than maybe one or two thousand feet high. that's why i actually stopped to take this pic -- as pictorial evidence that it DOES happen.



as you head inland from those wetlands, you can take university avenue through east palo alto (pretty ghetto place -- it's where Dangerous Minds was set, apparently), over the 101 into palo alto itself. EPA and palo alto are night and day. this is the outer fringe of palo alto:



these pics were taken in early feb through early march, btw. i just didn't get a chance to post 'em up til now. so yes... we have no real winter. we have a spring though :)

those are actually magnolia trees lining the street. the bay area has a great abundance of three trees: magnolias, oaks, and plum.

later on down university ave, you get to downtown palo alto. the peninsula is full of these affluent little downtown streets. the entire western side of the bay is settled along the 101, which runs close to the bay, but there's always plenty of natural character along the way -- stretches of wetlands, forests and open areas up in the coastal hills where 280 runs. but the path of the 101 is essentially joins a string of little cities, each with their own little downtown, between San Francisco and San Jose.

the east bay is quite different in character; much more urbanized and conformist. that's why east bay sucks :D

anyway, this is downtown palo alto. this street runs right into stanford university, but it's not really a college area. a lot of very pricey boutiques, a lot of swanky restaurants -- there are about 4-5 rug stores and probably way more "art galleries" along the stretch of university.



in that pic you can see Borders on the left. it's actually one of the first Borders ever opened, and they opened it in a converted old theater. it's pretty neat -- you can still see the theater structure in the floorplan, only now it's full of books.

there are some chain stores on university too. here's cheesecake factory, next to crepevine where they serve - surprise! - crepes.



a little bit off university, i saw this cute little house. deeper in palo alto's treelined streets you can find some truly ginormous houses that probably cost anything from 5-20 mil a pop. palo alto's real estate is obscenely expensive, though. i wouldn't be the least bit surprised if this tiny little victorian house cost a million or more, considering it's about a block off university and two blocks from el camino real, which forms the border between palo alto and stanford university.



i actually mainly took that pic for the plum tree in full bloom, though :) i love the plum trees of the bay. they bloom late in january or early in february, and they're always the first sign of the spring. back at my old place, there was a plum tree on the street leading up to it. i used to love walking by in the rain. something about the smooth black bark glistening in the rain, and the fragile pink flowers against a stormy sky. all the petals scattered on the ground always broke my heart, though.

about a block or two from that house is this nifty looking brick building. i passed it about a zillion times before i bothered to figure out what it is -- it turns out it's not actually ellison's (no idea what that is/was). you can't see it, but most of the building actually houses Ideo, which is apparently a world-famous design firm. they have design firms up in the city, as well as in the "usual" cities (nyc, london, shanghai, chicago), but this is actually where they started.



this gorgeous stormy sky was taken... i don't remember when. but it was gorgeous. the skies over the bay are always lovely in the spring -- very moody and mutable. i love that you can see those storm clouds coming in from the west, over the mountains.



this was taken ... probably the same day or maybe the day after, at sunset, over the rooftops of a more residential part of palo alto:



and this pic was taken one night as i was leaving palo alto. this is actually taken almost exactly where the first downtown pic was taken -- you can see the same borders on the right this time because i was going the other way on university -- and shows the awesome xmas lights on the trees. as far as i know those lights pretty much never come down. they light up every night.



okay, that's it for this one! next few posts will probably be pics from my san diego trip, followed by pics from chicago redux. eventually i wanna get some pics of stanford, the bay area mtns, and a couple places in SF, though. and maybe monterey :)

cherry trees.

So.

It seems that the celebrated cherry tree out in front of my apartment, subject of so many adoring diary entries about early spring in san francisco, is some sort of FREAK OF NATURE because it blooms in late january/early february when the rest of the nation's trees bloom...like, now.

I thought for a while maybe it was just San Fran that bloomed early? No luck. Suddenly these days I'm noticing all them cherry trees blooming their asses off all over the place while my cherry tree...

...already has leaves.

Really ugly dark brownish green leaves.

Ah well. Heh. I still love it. I mean, I guess it's all springy/summery for cherry trees to bloom in april/mayish, but there's something about those fragile blossoms blooming in late january, when everything else is bare and cold and the rain freezes your nose off.

Just for a week, though. They bloom too early. Every morning I'd go outside and find cherry blossom petals littered all over the floor, blown off during the night. I bet the other trees last longer.

Poor beautiful strange early-blooming tree.

beach weather!

It's finally happened.

Gone are the grey days of winter, when you had to wear three layers to go outside. Gone is the rain (for now, at least); the chill and the damp. Gone are the soggy umbrellas and the squooshy wet shoes.

It's finally here.

Warm breeze. 75 degrees. Brilliant, hot sun. Bay gleaming like fine-ground glass powder. Conversations outside. Traffic sounds mingling with streetcorner jazz. Girls in short-shorts and tank tops roaming the street in gaggles and packs. Endless blue sky above.

It, ladies and gentlemen, has finally, finally come.

BEACH! WEATHER!!!

Now. There are no beaches in the bay. No decent ones, at least. But I don't care if I have to drive all the way down to so-cal. I'll do it.

This weekend is one for lolling in the hot sand with the seawater drying on your skin. It's for tipping up your sunglasses to make eyes at the chick in the bikini, the one with the curves, passing your beach blanket. It's for tanning yourself so dark you end up scaring yourself with how white your grin is in the mirror.

It's one of THOSE weekends, that the rest of the world envies California for.

Sun.
Sand.
Sex on the beach.

(Or, fine, sex in the apartment, thinking of the beach.)

Heh! Woohoo! Summer!!

spring in the bay.

there's something about the Bay in the spring that's just magical. usually people associate spring with april, may; flowers bees sunshine and puppylove. if you lived in so-cal, you associated it with bigger crowds at the beach and the beginning of the hot days (not that it's ever COLD in san diego...). it's something different here, though.

for one thing, it starts in late january. i can't really draw the line between winter and spring very well, except i guess the spring (this year at least) is wetter and greener. winter's sort of a brittle time, lots of really fucking cold days with a crystalline blue sky above (see Blue for details), and a glaring white sun that doesn't seem to give any heat at all.

not that it's a bad time. there's something magical about winter in the bay, too. something about the crispness everything gets endowed with, like it was all flash-frozen and preserved. like everything's edged out for you by some cosmic exacto knife.

but then the spring comes and things go green. the hills, in particular. near the bay, the mountains that divide the coast from the central valley start getting carpeted in this sort of long wildgrass that, oddly enough, is gold in its maturity. it's not really DEAD - it comes back again. it's like grain. it turns colors. so summertime comes and all the hills are this glorious yellow-gold color (the fabled mountains of gold), but before that there's this very transient week or month or so when it's wet enough that the new grasses wake up and start pushing out. and then everything's green like you wouldn't believe under a heavy grey sky.

people associate green grass with blue skies. greenery, all sorts of it, is always cooler under a rainy sky.

i don't really know where i'm going with this. heh. thought i should write it down, though, because these days, every time i walk outside, i'm always thinking to myself, shit, gotta write this down, this experience, these sights.

so here they are, in no particular order other than that i remember them in:

the clouds rolling over the east bay hills, which are round and tree'd in ways so-cal hills never, ever are, and which are also green for that magical time of early-spring. the wispiness of those clouds, which become fog as they graze the tops of the mountains and pour down - or maybe mist. the way the trees show through them, the color of the sky.

the color of rain, the color of the sea, which turns silver, in the rain. the color of the afternoon. the pink and white cherry blossoms against the dark slender trunks and branches, which look so much like the limbs of a girl, especially when it rains and they're sleek and wet, that i don't wonder anymore why daphne turned into a tree.

the concrete wet with rain. the busses going past. the rain falling; the wind; the sun through the clouds. the clouds are different here in the bay; there's no real line between clouds and mist and fog. i think i mentioned this earlier, above. but they're all the same. it all depends on where you stand. the clouds are softer here, less defined, less...integrated?

the golden gate bridge stretched across the bay. the bay bridge. the city and its lights. berkeley's campanile. the sound of the traffic. the sound of the rain.

the thing about springtime in the bay is that it's not sunshine and birds. it's gray and wet, but at the same time it makes you feel SO good, so fresh and alive, but in a quiet way. it's gray and green and the shy/shocking vulnerable pink of a cherry blossom, and wet.

you want to take long walks - not even in forests or anything, but just on the streets, looking at the skyscrapers, or on university campuses, through the eucalyptus groves and the oak-lined oak-roofed paths, with the redwood and the pines nearby.

there's something holy about a forest in the rain. then again, maybe it's just the february rain of san francisco that's holy. rain is the heart of this season, and this season is beautiful. autumn in new england; springtime in the bay. it's the same sort of magic.

winged.

It's raining.

It's 35 degrees outside.

It's snowing everywhere above 1200 ft.

I'm listening to my mp3s. It's warm in my room. My chair's comfortable. I'm comfortable. It's a good night to stay up late.

Even if I have to be up in 4 hours, and have yet to sleep.

I had a bizarre dream last night. Actually, this morning. Actually, it was probably noon when I had this dream, but I had yet to rise from bed. At any rate, it was strange. It had to do with me trying to play mp3s, only all I managed to play was a recording of people having sex. Loudly.

No matter which mp3 I tried, it'd be moaning.

A coupla nights ago, I had a dream that my jaw was stuck. I couldn't open it all the way, and I couldn't close it either. It was a very disturbing dream. Finally I crunched it closed, and it felt like I shattered my teeth in the back. There were little pieces of tooth-shrapnel crunching, and there was the feeling of bloodbubbles bursting under the teeth. It was quite disgusting.

I opened my mouth, and half of my teeth fell out. While I was trying to put those back in (no blood this time, oddly), the rest fell out. So I put them all in, like a old man's dentures, and shut my mouth to keep them in. I was just worrying about how I'd go through life without teeth when I woke up.

The scary thing is I swear I've had this dream before--not the teeth falling out bit, but the stuck-jaw bit.

I didn't mean to rant about bad dreams, by the way.

It's really raining hard outside.

It's inspirational, the rain. There's something inherently right about writing when you can hear and see the rain outside. I like the way rain drums on the roof. I like how you can hear it dribbling down the raingutter pipes. I like how it snakes down the windowpane, and how outside everything's gleaming and wet.

I really like how streetlight reflects on the asphalt in the rain. And the way curtains of rain billow in the sky.

I'm a little tired...

I'm listening to a song called Indulge Me by Olive. A friend of mine told me to DL it. It's very...cool. Sensual. I think it could be a little slower, personally, because with the subtle throbbing beat it's got, it's really got the potential for being a chill-out type of song.

By that I mean a song you can stretch back and close your eyes and groove to.

Really, though, this song has that sort of potential. But it's a little too fast, which makes it more the dancing type of song. It has one HELL of a provocative beginning.

It sounds like glints of moonlight off of moving skin. When you see just flashes, hints of the curve of a shoulder, the length of a bare thigh, the dip of the spine at the small of a girl's back. Someone else's hand there, the arm curling around the waist, the fingers splayed over the skin. And slowly rolling movement, so the light shifts and cants and changes. When it's so detached and ghostly in the dark that it's not like you're looking at someone's body anymore; it's like a landscape of skin, or a seascape, always moving.

And shadows, hints of shuddering kisses...

There's a line in it--

Indulge me please/I'll take the breath you breathe

--that's awfully suggestive without really saying anything at all.

The woman who's singing, she has a very clear sort of voice, almost (but not quite) innocent. The song itself is slow and throbbing and...achy. It sounds like sex at first, but then it starts sounding like the sea on a quiet night. Always moonlight, though. Something about the song just whispers about the moon.

I'm starting to yawn...

I think there should be a planet out there that's nothing but liquid. The creatures that live there will be liquid, too. Sentient, capricious, everchanging whirlpool-beings. Currents. Living waves.

And the whole planet will be alive, too. You'd know this because of the way the tides will rise and fall.

What is it about rhythms that's inherently natural to the human mind? We just seem to like rhythms. The tide is calming. The falling rain is soothing. The phases of the moon, the swaying of a swing, the repeating clatter of train wheels over the tracks. The rocking of a cradle, making love. Music. Dance. Breath. Heartbeat.

I want to soar...

I want to have wings like the eagles.

I want to watch a thunderstorm from above. I want to dance in the falling snow without touching the ground. I want to see the desert rushing beneath me from five thousand feet in the air. I want to kiss the moon and ride the wind.

I want to nest at the peak of the tallest mountain. I want to be some aerial eagle/man spirit. I want to have eyes like the eagle, golden and sharp, and tiny feathers in the place of hair. I want to have a piercing cry that shatters the silence like some javelin of freedom.