barry burton

the Nor Cal

Ah Los Gatos. I ran in the hills. I took some pictures. I hung out at the Great Bear and had good soy lattes. It rained alot, but the clear nights I wandered around the town by myself. The air was sweet with spring. Yesterday morning I left at 7:30AM. Arrived at Clara’s house in San Francisco around 11:30AM. Mass transit is not the speediest. I didn’t make any mistakes this time, though, and didn’t have problems with late or otherwise non-showing busses or trains. Also I paid all of my fares and avoided being yelled at by cranky ticket officers. We ate lunch a Indian restaurant on Valencia, really good. Then stopped by Ritual for some after-lunch-coffee. I didn’t realize this but they french press regular coffee to order. Of course, super good stuff. We next ambled down to the mural alley in the mission. We caught BART up to Market St. and then rode a bus into Chinatown. There was a fire in an second or third floor apartment and a ton of people watching from the street. Firemen were present, but I never quite figured out what was going on. We walked from Chinatown into North Beach all of the way down to Ghirardelli Square. From there we took a bus down to the Palace of Fine Arts. Though I have driven by it many times, I had never actually been to it. It is really just a huge open dome. From 101 I had always assumed it to be a big building. Very cool feeling like an ant underneath it. We walked down past the Marina, admiring the sailboats as well as the houses that could admire the sailboats all of the time. Finally, we headed back to Clara’s house, taking a bus down Fillmore. I have to say, that is a great street. Lots of cool shops and cool housing that doesn’t look too trashy but at the same time doesn’t look too expensive (though I am sure it is still too expensive for me). We had to transfer to a different line at Hayes, so we walked down to Alamo Square. If you don’t know what this is, make sure to find my photographs. (UPDATE: look no further!)

When the Hayes bus finally came I ran to catch it and flagrantly jumped a metal railing separating the square from the sidewalk, ending up right beside the bus stop. To my dismay, the driver kept going! He stopped 20 feet after the bus stop, though. When we boarded, he said he couldn’t resist pretending to skip the stop after seeing my theatrics. :) After this, I made my way to SFO, where I flew out of at 10PM last night. I arrived in Detroit at 5AM. I am stuck here until 9AM. While in Chinatown, as Clara and I were walking down the street, a hipster / scenester guy walking in front of us suddenly fell to ground, sobbing uncontrollably. He was wearing some kind of thrift store looking pinstripe pants and toting a Timbuk2, worn close to his back, so he had a clue. A few people gathered around him and asked if he was alright. He said that he needed help, he had lost… lost his love. His life? No, his one true love. He had been bamboozled by the man. If he could just find his bike, he thought he would be alright. All the while, he remained prostrate, face pressed to the ground. I never decided if it was drugs or just a show. Walking around the city, you hear little bits of many people’s conversations. As you pass people on the sidewalk, you can usually catch a single phrase before they move out of earshot. While I am sure that these people are extraordinarily boring and say very boring things, their single phrases taken completely out of context are often quite humorous. Clara and I kept track of the best overheard phrases all day, though now I can’t remember most. Nothing like 4 hours of shut-eye in a semi-reclined position to cook the brain. I do remember one girl very seriously saying that she had to work on organizing people to do work. My favorite was one half of a phone conversation that went something like, “yeah, but the question is, can you make it without drugs?”