Kelly Joyner’s Final Days

I remember when I first moved here out to Mt. Hamilton road and saw the weekend and daily bicyclists heading up the hill, most on their way to Lick Observatory. They ranged from the relatively young to the very old, and I thought to myself: those are people in superhuman shape, to ride 40 miles round trip from an elevation of perhaps 300 feet up to 1600, back down to 600, then up to 4300 and repeating the whole thing in reverse. Superhuman shape.

I was right. Dear god, I was right.

Last Monday I bought a 21-speed Specialized Hard Rock mountain bike, about 14 years old and not the prettiest thing in the world but in pretty good mechanical condition. I’d ridden a bike about once in the last decade, but I’ve spent an hour most days on a stationary bike in an air-conditioned gym for the last few months, so it’s practically the same thing, right? Right?

Maybe not quite.

First I went up Mount Hamilton, which is a ludicrously scenic twisty two-lane highway with an average eight-degree grade, and this is, indeed, a pretty good way to get some exercise: go uphill until you’ve reached your goal, then turn around and cool off and air dry on the thrillingly effortless coast back down.

Today, my goal turned out to be about ten minutes uphill, because my seat is, in technical terms, maladjusted and what us bicyclists like to call “a pain in the ass”. In non-technical terms, it felt like somebody was trying to rape my butt with a bicycle seat.

I was having such a good time on the way back down, however, that when I got back to Rose View drive, I foolishly said to myself that I should just ride all the way to the bottom of the hill (1.8 miles and about 630 vertical feet) and see how long it would take me to get back up. I think, basically, I was just really enjoying the terrifying slalom and didn’t want to stop.

I did enjoy it, too, tremendously, watching the valley lit golden in the evening sun, even though in the back of my mind I knew I was going to pay for it.

Here’s the thing: I can’t make it back up the mountain. Well, I can, but not in one go. I had to get off and walk my bike an embarrassing number of times. Partly this is because I haven’t ridden a bike in so long, and never one with so many gears; I learned several things about gear selection on the way back up that would have made things a bit easier. That damned seat didn’t do me any favors either, but in the end saliva was dripping from my lips and my mouth was full of sand and I felt just a little light-headed, so I’m not kidding myself: riding up a mountain on a bike is hard work and it’s going to take me a week or two to even do the little stretch I have to do in order to commute with any kind of panache.

It’s not all bad, though: that walk takes me 45 minutes, and on my bike I made it in 25, although a good bit worse for wear than I’d have been on foot.

I have not written in some while. It is not that I have had nothing to write, but that I have been preoccupied with the doing of things rather than the chronicling of them. I have also decided that I should not rush what I write, but finish and edit them so that they shall be a proper record of my thoughts and experiences rather than a rush that gets only the guts of my experience rather than the flavor of it.

I have decided, however, that I must before long begin to write of this place where I live, a place not an estate but closer to one than any a dirt poor kid from the woods has lived before. If I do not describe these things then when my lease is done and I move somewhere cheaper to save the paltry sum I can save by doing so, my experiences will be lost. I will have only my fading memory to look back on in my old age, and it fails me so often now that I fear it will be worse than useless when the rest of my hair has gone gray.

This place is to me aspirational; the life I live here is the one I will strive to live from now on. It’s a vision not of richness but of aging quality, of sturdiness, simplicity and beauty.

It has a hot tub. A hot tub is a thoroughly middle class luxury, but it’s one I’ve never had before, and mine is built on a platform above my house so that it looks westerly down on the north end of the valley. It is often my pleasure early on a weekend afternoon to turn on the jets so that the water warms, and late on a weekend afternoon to dress in swimming shorts and a t-shirt and Birkenstock sandals, to gather a towel and a beer or a cuba libré and a volume of short stories by Ernest Hemingway or Ian Fleming and walk up the steps to the hot tub.

I can then spend the rest of the daylight warm under the shade of the canopy, reading the adventures of James Bond or Nick Adams while I drink my drink and watch the sun slowly fall down through the sky past the hill to my north, painting in rainbow the waters of the San Francisco bay and burning the clouds off the Santa Cruz mountains. I watch the city and the cities come alive with light, the crickets begin their nightly song.

When I am done I stand in the tub and pull up and over the heavy cover and when it finally thumps into place I feel a satisfaction of a job properly done. I gather my things and step soaking into my sandals, sloshing comfortably in the leather back down the steps, the wind chilling my body as I walk to the kitchen door.

Inside I squish across the tile floor of my kitchen (clean! or an approximation) and turn off the jets in the pantry, then squish some more dripping up the carpeted spiral to my loft, where I shower briefly in my spacious echo tile shower echo room under the hot water, then walk naked around the top floor that is mine and dry myself and look out the windows at the expanse of the valley below, a million twinkling lights with lives behind them and the still glowing pastel stained glass sky above the mountains, and I am content.

The next few years I will not live here, I will venture down into that valley for the small sum I can save by doing so and when I wake up in the morning and look out my window I will see only the house next door. When I watch the sunset from my home I will see if I am lucky some small slice of mountain below the sky. I will remember this place, though, and in time I will live in a place like it again.

(Skip the text and just watch the video)

I think I might do a little mini-series on Firefox add-ons, because I’m geek like that.

If you don’t use Firefox, then wise up and start. You can get it here, it’s a tiny little download, and it’s just about the best browser out there.

There are a few minimalists who will disagree with me, and some of those people actually spend a lot of time on the web, so I won’t denigrate their opinion, but I’ll say this: I spend a lot of time on the web: multiple-digit hours of every day in my browser. I don’t want minimalism. I want a flexible, full-featured environment that provides cool tools for me to build efficient work flows and have all the information in the world at my fingertips.

Firefox does that, through its “add-ons”, and this video demos a couple of my current favorites:

Delicious: Delicious is an online bookmarks site, sort of “social bookmarking” place where you can store bookmarks and tag them up, and you can share them with others or keep them private. They’ve got a really cool add-on for Firefox that does a whole bunch of neat stuff, but in this video I’m only demonstrating one: The delicious toolbar.

I use on average three or four computers a day, and until recently they all had their own toolbar, and the ones I didn’t use much didn’t have anything in the tool bar at all. Today, I use the delicious toolbar to maintain two different toolbars–one for work, and one for home–and to access those toolbars from any computer.

Personas: Personas is a theming system for Firefox that lets you pick popular themes from a pop-up menu, changing the theme on your browser at the touch of a button. Their website has a simple facility where you can make your own themes and share them with others. It’s surprising to me how much a tasteful theme can relieve the monotony of staring at a browser all the time.

So my brother has this picture as his desktop and he think’s it’s the most awesome picture taken by anybody, ever, in the history of all mankind. I’m not gonna go out of my way to disagree, although really it’s pretty obvious that this is the best picture ever taken in all the history of mankind.

I was sitting up real close to the television and I noticed she was all kind of blocky looking, like she had some resolution issues, and I said something about it and he said yeah it’s not that great quality. So I said did you check for higher resolutions, because I knew it came from Flickr, and he said he did check for higher resolutions, but he didn’t think the one on the desk top was the highest resolution one, even though he’d had the better one right there in his browser.

So–and here’s the important part–so I say: I like my bitches in the highest resolution available.

I didn’t know I could be so profound. But then, profoundly what? Disturbing?

I mean how does that come out of your mouth? Is it a geek thing? An instinctually ironic generation X thing? A consequence of being digital? Or what?

At any rate, it was awesome so I twittered it.

I think I could get into twitter. Not as a serious thing the way it is with all these people broadcasting the minutest minutiae of their day-to-day lives, but as some kind of neo-haiku, maybe. some fiction, maybe, like those cell phone novels you always read about they have in Japan.

Hmm.

Yeah, so, I don’t remember seeing Diamonds are Forever with Sean Connery before, but it is now just about my favorite Bond flick. It starts out all kind of low-key, but then it’s like whoa! Blofeld, and then there’s a fucking space laser, and it’s out of nowhere, and it blows up fucking everything. I say, it really is a winner.

I say my favorite Bonds are Sean Connery, Daniel Craig, Pierce Brosnan, and Roger Moore, in that order.

It’s like a spy procedural wrapped up in an adversary romance mixed up with a Hitchcockian twist-a-noir. Paul Giamatti, Clive Owen, and Julia Roberts all put in fantastic performances full of chemistry and lunacy. Very, very good. One of my favorite spy movies ever.

The good thing about a lock is that it’s not worth stealing. You don’t have to be too smart to know that, and the people I work around are all very smart. Nobody steals a lock. This is a good thing because I am very forgetful. I stopped working out for a month because I thought it would be more fun to drink like a fish and smoke like a chimney and work until late. When I came back the next time to the gym my padlock was laying on top of the lockers like I’d left it there the night before.

Nobody steals a lock. It’s not because people respect locks, it’s because if you don’t have a key or know the combination a lock is only worth as much as the metal it’s made of. As long as your lock is not very heavy or very golden, no one will steal it.

I was thinking this the next night when I had left my lock at the gym again and it was there just the same, and I had no more thought it than I turned around and saw a big shiny U-Haul padlock hanging on an open locker with the key in it. I looked around the locker room but there was nobody it could belong to.

I’m not a natural thief. I like the sneaking around parts, those are fun, but I don’t like taking other people’s stuff. The whole night when I was working out I was saying to myself that you ought to do things in life that you’re never going to have a chance to do again, and when are you going to have a chance to steal a lock that’s actually worth something?

I do a lot of security work so my sense of irony almost demanded I steal that lock. When I went back to the locker room it was still there so I showered and dressed and put on my hoodie and in one smooth motion pulled the lock from the locker and put it in my pocket.

I didn’t look around to see if anybody had seen me because I knew they hadn’t and if I had it would only make me look suspicious. I slung my pack over my shoulder and I walked out of that locker room and I made for the front door.

When I was sure that nobody had seen me, and no one was going to stop me, and I had without a doubt got away with it, I stopped by the empty front desk and took a stick-it note and wrote “found on locker 87″ and stuck it to the lock, and left it there. I signed it with a big enigmatic K like I was Zorro or something. Or Korro, anyway. What do I need with a lock, when I’ve already got mine?

Had mine. I left it in the gym on Friday and when I came back today to work out it was gone. I guess not everybody’s so smart. It could still turn up somewhere, though. I’m very forgetful.

It was forty-six degrees this afternoon, less with the wind. This is not a natural temperature for a Texan, but the sun painted the grass green and the flowers yellow and the blue sky with its fluffy clouds would not let me stay inside.

I found things to do and I wore micro fleece and a knit cap while I drank rum and coke and read a Woody Allen book in sock feet with Birkenstocks. I sat on the porch in the sun and pretty soon forty-six degrees wasn’t very cold after all.

I drained my hot tub and cleaned it and filled it up again. It was really dirty, brown and filled with leaves after our first party. I’m not sure how it happened but it did get awful dirty. It didn’t take me long to clean out. I have this week to balance it before our second party this Friday.

I crushed all our cans and separated a few months of recycling and all I could think was we sure do put away a lot of booze.

So the Obama administration is leaking its latest greatest financial bailout plan to the New York Times, and the very first thing I thought was that Geithner must have hired Henry Paulson to work it out, because, aside from some extra polish (we’ll have auctions to determine how much these mortgages are worth!) it’s the same damned turd Paulson originally pushed through Congress as the Troubled Assets Recovery Plan, and it’s as stupid now as it was then. Paul Krugman explains why, but the short answer is that Obama and company seem to think we’re in a bank panic rather than a recession, and that we can buy our way out by paying bankers top dollar for the big huge mortgage dump they just took on us. The Financial Times gives a convincing explanation of why this is bunk.

The fact of the matter is that home prices got swollen beyond all reason, and if the government pays top dollar for these upside down homes, they’re going to get screwed in the end, because people are and will continue to walk away from mortgages where they owe hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the home is worth. Nothing that happens in Washington is going to make anybody pay a million bucks any time soon for the house I’m sitting in in California. The notional buyers of these CDOs know that’s probably true, and this plan just allows them to make a highly-leveraged gamble with taxpayers money: only 3% of the outlay is from private parties! Does that sound at all familiar to you? Because if you’ve been paying attention it should!

Or maybe I’m just sore because this deal is beiing offered to financial wizards on Wall Street and nobody’s offering me a piece.

The Oscars were pretty cool this year; I really liked the bit with using former winners as presenters. I was going to make my standard snide remark about the Academy having no taste in movies, but after making the list below, I found to my horror that many of them had, in face, received an Oscar or two. Here, in no particular order is a list of my favorite movies of 2008. Not necessarily the best, just my visceral favorites. What’s yours?

Hellboy II — Beautiful production design, great makeup, interesting characters, good one-liners. Sure, moral ambiguity with a darkly admirable villain and petty, petulant heroes has been done to death, but what hasn’t?

Vicky Cristina Barcelona — Sure, sure, you think I just put this movie here because it has Scarlet Johansson making out with Penelope Cruz, but that’s only half the story. The other half is that it’s a stunningly beautiful movie with colors and textures that make my eyes happy.

Baghead — Mumblecore slacker horror moviemaking satire relationship flick. The unspeakable truth of low-budget indie flicks is that the acting mostly sucks ass. Not here, man, not here. Of course, it’s an Austin flick, so I may be partial.

WALL-E — Top-notch animation and a great story are par for the Pixar course, but I like this movie because it is so intensely visual–most of the interesting stuff in the movie happen without any dialogue at all. That’s a rare thing in movies, and it works here as it does in a couple of my other favorites, I am Legend or The Scent of Green Papaya.

Batman: The Dark Knight — This is really a so-so movie. “What we’ll do is, we’ll move the shenanigans of the past eight years into a fictional setting, and construct all these situations that show the moral conundrums the current global environment poses, and it’ll be all allegorical and stuff”. Meh. Been done before, whatever, blah blah blah. At least they blew up a major character, so that was unexpected, for Hollywood at least. Really, the reason this movie is on the list is Ledger’s Joker. It’s not because he’s dead–it was just one hell of a performance. Lip-smacking creepy scary crazy louche fantastic is what it was. Heath ledger made Jack Nicholson look like a chump, and that’s no mean feat.

Smart People – Dennis Quaid does a very believable turn as a socially challenged professor, Ellen Page proves she’s can play more than one note as his daughter, and Thomas Haden Church is hilarious as his slacker brother. Sarah Jessica Parker puts in a solid performance too. The movie itself is like Little Miss Sunshine without the sap, the talke of a semi-functional family that works, except when it doesn’t. What I found really interesting about it was the really geeky, intellectual voice that motivates all the dialog.

Rambo — This is the bloodiest, most brutal movie I’ve ever seen. That’s why it’s on my list of favorites: because I spent the whole movie going “Whoa, FUCK! Did you just see that? I can’t even believe I just saw that.” It’s like Stallone was worried people thought he’d gone soft in his old age, so instead he just decided to sit down with a nice Chianti, throw a baby or two on the fire, and write a movie so over-the-top violent that it would set a new benchmark for deaths per minute.

In Bruges — A sort of thinking man’s action flick. A bit heartless, perhaps, but not everything has to be about heart. The performances are all smooth, the dialog pitch-perfect, and the plot seamless. It is in many parts laugh-out-loud funny, and never seems to take itself too seriously.

Body of Lies — I’m a sucker for spy flicks, and I’m a sucker for Ridley Scott flicks, and I’ve never seen a bad movie with Leonardo di Caprio in it. This movie is all three. ’nuff said.

W — I fucking hate George Bush, and this film managed to make him in some ways sympathetic without making him a total moron, which is a good trick. It does make him look pretty bad, though, and I like that; it uses his own quotes and footage to do it, too, which is genius of Tina-Fey-as-Sarah-Palin caliber.