of alternators, farmers markets and macaroons

My car broke down on Clement Street in San Francisco which was damn annoying. Even more annoying was that I had taken Susie's advice and gone to Green Apple Books to sell a bunch of CD's and books which have been cluttering up my house and after all it is spring time - I want clutter gone, I am in a cleaning up and cleaning out kinda mood. I would have just donated this stuff but Susie had told tall tales of getting a reasonable chunk of change for her stuff, so I thought 'hey, that's enough for another good meal at my fave restaurant' so I loaded the boxes into the car and we headed off to the City, and as the battery warning light flashed on the dashboard I was through the toll plaza and called my mechanic and he said 'bring it in on your way home'. Yeah. Ok. That woulda been good. What made this really annoying was that while they went through my CD's and books including the copy of Andrea Dworkin's 'Intercourse' which Susie Bright gave me 20 years ago and inscribed with the words 'the best fuck book anytime, anywhere' (as a joke), Susie (Fought not Bright) and I went and got coffee which cost as much as the piddling amount they offered me for the few items the bookstore kept. That is some embarrassment, walking out of a used bookstore with almost everything you'd tried to sell and having spent most of the income on a weak milky cup of joe.

We got in the car and tick tick tick tick. Shit fuck goddamm. 4pm on a weekday and stuck in the nether regions of San Francisco. I thought of calling my old buddy Tim who used to run a Volkswagen repair shop on Irving Street called Folk Wisdom and where I learned how to replace a starter or water pump and where I discovered that, even in California, hands could get really really cold. And then, suddenly, things sort of looked up. The tow truck came in a miraculous half an hour, my insurance company agreed to pay for the tow all the way back to Berkeley instead of the 5 miles the tow company said they would pay for - which woulda put me bang in the middle of the lower deck of the Bay Bridge. And my mechanic, one of those surly Yugoslavs with a heart of gold, was waiting for us when we arrived and Susie and I walked the mile back to my house.

Of course, when your car needs a freakin' new alternator, one tries to find the bright side. But it could have been a lot worse, right?

So, this morning I loaded up some of the dogs in Susie's Miata which has some pretty weird sounds of its' own and headed to the Albany Bulb where I almost ran into a reversing Lexus SUV. Only to notice that it was the same Lexus SUV being driven by the same person who tried to run me into oncoming traffic less than a year ago. This is an ugly story from my recent past. I better call my therapist before I'm tempted to blog about it. If I could just get back to my novel I could switch the identities, change the car colors ( I'll have to leave it as a pretentious Lexus SUV) and pretend that this crazy situation all just happened in my fertile imagination.

But I enjoyed my walk, there are almost as many wildflowers at the Albany Bulb as I saw in the desert last week, Dan my mechanic broke the bad news to me about my car (and the cost) and I saw my stimulus check float away in a sea of auto repairs. But somehow I wasn't that perturbed. I came home, chopped some wood (actually I chain sawed it), plucked weeds from the front yard, did some photo work and then sauntered to the Tuesday Farmers Market just a block from my house. Local honey and Vital Vittles bread (from right here in Berkeley), cheeses from Marin, Blue Bottle coffee, vegetables and fruits erupting from baskets, organic meats and ice cream, and my little addiction - an almond macaroon which is so buttery melt in the mouth and crispy on the outside that I savor every mouthful like a first kiss.

I had been feeling and am feeling - so at odds inside, so wanting to leave the country, leave the state, leave Berkeley, sell my house, rent out my house, change my identity, not be me, be somewhere, someone, anyone else, be with someone, anyone, elsewhere, be a boy, not a boy, a teenage boy, not a girl that's for sure, buy a prefab house and persuade Aida to let me put it on an acre or two of her land, move to Tennessee, go to Cuba, go to Palermo, finish my novel, start taking photographs again goddammit, make organic dog biscuits and sell them at the organic farmer's market where you can't take your dog. It is unbelievably tough being me. The macaroon sure helped though!

Comments

[RU]

I think every possibility on that long list of identities and options is perfect. So you can't go wrong.

[Deborah Wolfe]

East or west Tennessee?

[Jill]

...where the elephants roam Deborah...
http://www.elephants.com/index.php

[Deb in Minnesota]

Jill, after reading all of that, I don't want to complain about coming home from sunny, Southern California to a clogged kitchen sink. I wanna be a boy too, a boy just picking up rocks and watching ants on the sidewalk.

[michael wertz]

dear jill, what a sad and true thing you type about. i hear you and see you.

sorry about your car.

~michael