Amongst the Buildings and the People

There are few things I enjoy more than walking in cities.

Walking around an urban area is, for me, about the journey rather than the destination. It’s not about getting from point A to point B but about seeing what’s between them. Walking the streets of city is about absorbing the unfolding narrative of the polis.

I’m in San Francisco today for a conference at Fort Mason Center. I drove up to Oakland last night, stayed there, and took BART over to the city early this morning. Where I was going is nowhere near BART station, and as I did when I was here last year, I decided to walk rather than take a connecting bus. So at 7 AM I came out of the Montgomery Street station and walked into the heart of downtown San Francisco.

If I’d been in a car or a bus, I wouldn’t have noticed the transitions from banks to Chinese restaurants to Italian places as I walked along Montgomery and Columbus. I wouldn’t have gotten a glimpse of Alcatraz as the sun peeked over the western hills, or seen the Golden Gate Bridge peering out of the morning fog. I wouldn’t have walked past a restaurant near Coit Tower that I ate at more than a dozen years ago and thought “wait a minute, I remember that place.” I wouldn’t have gotten to see the morning athletes out for a training run or bike ride along the waterfront. And I wouldn’t have gotten the chance to sit on a dew-kissed bench on Fort Mason Green and watch a flock of Canada geese avoid the rotating sprinklers in a great grassy oasis with the apartment- and tree-covered hills in the background while I wrote this post.

Today was a good day for, as Gwen put it, a morning ramble.

Update

Fitness: Rest day

Keeping It Local

Going into it, I knew that the Santa Barbara Beer Festival wasn’t going to be of the same caliber as the Oregon Brewers Festival. I was ok with that, and I adjusted my expectations appropriately. That was the wise choice, and as a result, I had a lot of fun.

From the beer-tasting side, the festival gave me the chance to do two things. Most of the commercial breweries there were fairly local, so it became an opportunity to taste beers that I’ve seen on shelves before but haven’t previously tried. From this category, my two favorites were the Telegraph Brewing Company White Ale and the North Coast Brewing Company Le Merle. The other thing the festival gave me the chance to do was try beers from the handful of local homebrew clubs. This was actually more fun than tasting the commercial beers, because the homebrewers tended to take a lot more risks and produce more interesting — if potentially divisive — beers. Of these, the Santa Barbeerians’ Wet Hop Red Ale, the C.A.R.P. Brewers’ Dry-Hopped Pale Ale, and the Cal Poly Brew Crew’s 80 Schilling deserve special mention. I’m becoming more and more tempted to get involved with one of these groups; if I wasn’t going to be out of town for the Barbeerians next meeting on next Saturday, I’d be there.

Beyond the beer, what made the festival fun was spending a gorgeous day outside, hanging out with friends. Some beer-loving friends of ours from LA came up for the day, so we picked a spot in the middle of festival, dropped down some towels, and staged expeditions out the various tents to bring back beer. There was lots of sharing and discussing. Having a posse of about seven seems pretty ideal for something like this.

So, different from Oregon, but just as successful. Which is the point, I suppose.

Update

Fitness: One Hundred Pushups initial test (16)

Training Pays Off

A few months ago, my friend Jill said on Twitter:

Fun workout this morning w/my marathon training group. Ran ~13mi total, including a 2mi tempo & 800 meter repeats around a wood chip trail

And I thought, “That’s crazy. I could never just go out and run 13 miles on a Saturday morning.”

Fast forward to last night after wine tasting with some friends of mine visiting from out of town. It turns out that Mike has just run a marathon and that he had Jeff are training for another race right now. So Jeff says to me, “We’re looking to go on a ten to twelve mile run in the morning. Where should we go?” I start to think about, I start describing a few ideas, and then I stop and say, “I’ll meet you at your hotel at 6:30.”

This morning, the three us went on an eleven mile run. It’s not quite the half-marathon distance Jill was talking about, but it’s still a substantial amount of running. The fact that I could just decide last night that I was going to do it and then pull it off made me feel — quite frankly — awesome.

Update

Fitness: Ran 11 miles

Victories in the War of Art

Tonight I finished the zeroth draft of the novel.

At this point, it can be read start to finish. It has a plot, and so far as I know, all of the relevant bits of the plot are in there. There are almost certainly inconsistencies in it, as well as problems of voice, pacing, description, and tone. To find them, I’m going to have to read the whole thing — all almost-fifty-five-thousand words of it — in order for the first time. There’s a lot of work ahead of me to beat this manuscript into a first draft, into something that I’d be willing to show people. Revising fiction, especially fiction of this length, is territory largely unknown to me, so I expect it will be slow going. To quote Churchill, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Still, I’d rather wrestle with a page full of words that are not quite right than deal with one devoid of them entirely. I’ve won the first battle. I believe a brief rest is in order. Then, on with the remainder of the campaign.

Update

Fitness: Rest day
Sun, Moon, and Stars: 333 words, 142 seven-day average, 282 average, 54900 total; 157 days written (out of 195 days)

Age & Treachery Trumps Youth & Vigor

Back in 2004, I ran my first half-marathon. In fact, I ran three:

• San Diego Half-Marathon (18 January 2004) — 2:14:42
• Pacific Shoreline Half-Marathon (1 February 2004) — 2:01:30
• Big Sur Half-Marathon (17 October 2004) — 2:11:58

I hadn’t run any since, until yesterday, when I added another one to the list:

• City to the Sea Half-Marathon (9 October 2011) — 1:50:04

The lesson to be learned from this is obvious: I could totally take twenty-six-year-old me in a fight.

Update

Fitness: Rest day
Sun, Moon, and Stars: 328 words, 152 seven-day average, 281 average, 54567 total