Haight Street That Great Street (I Just Want to Say)

Image by Sebastià Giralt via Flickr

Lunch today with the Drunk Boyz, those USF patricians, something I used to do far more often when purse was full and liver was limber, able to bench press a quart of the pure Hippocrene and beg for more.

Yes, it's all slowed down, the socializing after work that gives sparkle to the workplace. What changes? Workplace friendship or merely tax law?

This was actually socializing before work in the sense that most of us aren't teaching or working otherwise to advance USF this summer season. That is, it is not something we are on payroll doing, though actually we can't NOT work on USF's behalf at play or rest. We learn and we plan. This joke is now officially at an end: We really do spend a lot of time getting ready for our fall classes, mistrusting repetition. Regurgitating old notes suggests a lack of attention, a surrender to ease. I worry myself with wanting to do better.

Anyway, today was a traditional lunch. We went back to Martin Macks, which burned down a year or two ago and which we had kind of abandoned because the illegal waitresses -- oh sweet Irish lasses about whose county origins we could always joke -- did not quite always get our kidding. But now the refurbished MM, though noisy as the inside of a bell, did have quite a pleasant new waitress/bartender, both curvy and willowy and *a patter*. Old gentlemen like old dogs like to be patted, at which point they growl in their sleep. Her white hands fluttered like birds, distributing attention among the ancients.

At some point a 3rd/4th/5th round of drinks was ordered, and this sweet miss said, "I've got that covered." Ah, that's what keeps us coming back, that courtesy in or cups that assumes we will live to drink another day.

Old friends, old stories and always something new. Did you know goats were grazing at USF this summer, tending the lawn?

BW was in attendance. We hadn't seen him in years -- literal years -- and it was good to see him, the gray in his sideburns and the halt in his step notwithstanding.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

That would be your "Ulysses" by Tennyson. What comes first, the drink or the poetry.
Sometimes I get confused.

Where Were You When the Scott Peterson Death Penalty Came Down? God Help Me, I Know.

I was at Martin Mack's saloon on Haight St. in San Francisco. We had been watching -- perhaps, I should say we being subjected to -- the soccer game between Manchester United and Fulham, about which you cannot begin to imagine my depth of indifference, when someone twigged to the fact the Peterson jury was coming back in with the penalty verdict and changed channels.

It was Christmas lunch for the Drunk Boyz. The Drunk Boyz are an assortment of guys who either work for the University of San Francisco or worked there once. As my regular readers know, I am what you might call a fetish consumer of alcoholic beverages. I talk about drinking more than I actually drink -- you have figured that out. To me such consumption symbolizes a kind of Bohemian and/or creative lifestyle, so I blog blog blog about the drinks I had while a journalist. It's personal, quirky even, and if you go to the top right of this page and click through an assortment of other blogs hosted by Blogger, you will see that my talk of wine, beer and the estimable Jack Daniels Black is embedded in the context of one hundred thousand teenage girls moaning and bemoaning the fact Tab did not look at them today in geometry class and should be judged/damned accordingly.

Sweet goddess, I wish it were geometry class in which Tab, in all his myopia, looked through, past or over all the Candaces and Sarah Jessicas and Winonas of the world. But it was probably Self Esteem for Sophomores, and thus the future belongs to those lands out there where the sun sets. (No, not Hawaii. Keep moving.)

But you get the point. I have an occasional drink, and I plaster it on this blog like a swoosh logo.

To place you in the moment once again, I remind that the Drunk Boyz -- not drunk and far from boys -- were at Martin Mack's on Haight St. in San Francisco having our little holiday season sitdown, and the "football" was on the telly when those in positions of responsibility at MM in HS turned the channel over to the revelation of the Scott Peterson verdict. And, after a certain amount of delay and confusion, we learned that the jury had decided he should die. And if you believe what the Drunk Boyz had to say, once the dire penalty was announced, none of us had paid much attention to the crime or its aftermath, including the trial. In my case that was certainly true. A plump pretty white woman great with child was savagely murdered. Subtract the "white" and it's a day in the life of the world. (And maybe you should subtract the "plump," too.) It's as if, if you concentrate on the obscenity of this death, if you put too much time, energy and interest into this horrendous murder, you are somehow giving yourself a pass on Darfur and Sadr City and other places where terrible is something you do before lunch, to jumpstart the day.

I did have a brandy, followed by coffee, boys and girls -- don't do this at home. But still, I am writing on fumes. All the way home across the Bay Bridge I listened to the news conference with the jurors who chose to talk, and everything they said touched me. The jury system as theoretical construct: you and me dealing with too much information. Beaucoup slack to those who actually did the job. I do not think that the death penalty is a good idea, but when some people are executed my mind says one thing and my lizard brain, there somewhere down low in the far suburbs of the skull, says otherwise.

The Drunk Boyz are good boys. We talked of institutional politics and long-range plans and which college deans we might be able to play/manipulate/enlist in our righteous cause and those which we almost certainly can't, as we sat there sharing thimble by thimble the cheap fierce inadequate Chilean merlot -- yet why was my voice so much louder than it needed to be? -- in the first booth at Martin Mack's on Haight St. in San Francisco, California as we learned that Scott Peterson may die soon rather than later, only the timeline but not the final outcome subject to appeal and lawyers billing $300 an hour.

It's only the telly, isn't it, turtle dove?