Kelly Joyner’s Final Days

Things I have learned:

In rich people neighborhoods, it is a bad idea to drive a busted-up car.

In rich people neighborhoods, the mail comes early.

As the Iraq war sort of winds down, I thought I’d point this out, since most people don’t seem to remember it: the Bush administration lied. They said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that they were working with Al Qaeda, that they were behind 9/11, that we were going there to give Iraqis the gift of freedom, that we’d be welcomed as liberators, that Iraqi petrodollars would pay for reconstruction, and that we could fight the war with very few soldiers (but a lot of expensive equipment). These are, inarguably, lies. The people saying them at the time knew they were lies. Many people pointed out at the time that they were lies, and anybody who did a little investigation beyond watching Fox News or CNN or whatthefuckever could and did find out that they were lies.

As a result of these lies, thousands of Americans are dead. Thousands. DEAD. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead. Halliburton, KBR, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics, among thousand of other members of the military-industrial complex general Eisenhower worried so rightly about are fat on more than seven hundred billion U.S. taxpayer dollars.

If you were one of the sheep I fucking told you about back then, I just want to remind you that I fucking told you so. I want to remind you that you’re a chump who paid good money to kill your friends and innocent people you never even met. I want to remind you that that blood is on your fucking dirty, dumb hands, and that any number of people you called traitors tried to tell you the truth.

Also, fuck you, asshole, you sorry piece of shit.

Try to do better next time.

I know you won’t.

Fucking sheep.

You think I’m kidding, but I’m really not.

Kevin Jordan and his girl Stephanie came out on July 4th, and we barbecued up some buffalo hot dogs and what everyone present claimed without exception were the best burgers they ever had.* The sun set blood red over a very hazy day, and as the valley lit up orange and purple in the twilight, it started to explode. Rockets shot into the air and exploded in star burst, leaving umbrellas of smoke hanging in the darkening sky. All night long, until I went to sleep at two, the valley looked like LA in the opening shot of Blade Runner. We were so far away from the fireworks that at times we would watch the whole show go off in Sunnyvale or Cupertino before the first sound of explosions reached us. I watched transfixed all night. I was reminded somehow of the news coverage from Baghdad at the beginning of Desert Storm.

Garnish with Mexican green onions, tomatoes, and butter-leaf lettuce. I used chopped Mexican onion greens instead of lettuce, and it was full of win. Dress with garlic aoili and serve on a corn-dusted Kaiser roll pan-toasted with margarine. For maximum win, serve with wedge-cut garlic fries, optionally dusted with whole ground chipotle pepper as well.

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.