| Sunday, October 13, 2002 |
00:56 - View from the Skyline
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So today was the first weekend day in three weeks that I had all to myself; yesterday I finished all the AR chapters that I had pending in my queue, and so today I decided to just lay around and do nothing all day-- maybe go see Spirited Away again later in the evening. Nothing with any kind of tight schedule or anything. Nothing outdoors, certainly.
Around about 5:00, though, I realized that sitting inside on the first day that I had the chance to not sit inside just seemed... I dunno. Wrong, somehow. Now, let me first clarify that I'm I'm not one of those health weirdos who insists on setting some kind of bizarre physical example by insisting that all those around me run around in circles in the hot sun all summer just so they can tell they're alive, even if just from the pain and the sweat. I like a good squash game, and I'd still be riding my bike to work every day if we still lived anywhere near work. But today, for some reason-- I don't know if it was the fact that the rest of the world seems to have suddenly exploded in a hundred different places at once, or that I'd just the other day managed to resurrect the battery of my iPod (tip of the day for iPod owners: if the battery stops being able to hold a charge, pry off the back with an Exacto knife, peel off the battery, and unplug it for a few hours; it'll be good as new when you plug it back in), or that I'd just started the export process on a half-hour Invader Zim episode that was going to tie up my computer for about the next ninety minutes. Whatever it was, I decided that being indoors was a fairly unappealing thing.
So I threw on some sandals and struck out towards the hills behind the house. The big wide streets that lead southeastward and up into the foothills seem about five times too wide for any kind of usefulness; my house is right on the boundary zone between older 80s-style housing full of multicultural families and trench-warfare software engineers, and the brand-new hillside estates with the long sloping lawns and white trellises and panoramic views and Lexus SUVs bought by people who made their millions in those halcyon pre-crash days. ("Mansionland," as Carmine from Zorak's throat would call it.) And now the real-estate signs in those front lawns cluster like the mailboxes would if they weren't sculpted into elegant brick and stucco pillars instead of fixed to wood pickets.
Walking past those houses, gaining elevation as the wide and empty boulevard wound its way through the slopes, listening to Daft Punk and William Orbit and Alan Menken music as served up from my leathern hip-flask, I couldn't help but wonder if there was anybody in the valley who had managed to time the market's writhings with sufficient aplomb as to be in the market to move into one of those hillside homes, like the carney family squatting in the Simpsons' house; biding their time in the lower rings of Minas Troney, putting their trash out at the sidewalk with the rest of the white-collar chumps, just waiting until their chance to cash out what stocks haven't lost value and emerge as the next wave of technoveau riche, waving to the previous generation of startled stock-market surfers on their bewildered way down: Hi guys! U EARNING: BAD! And perching on the upstairs decks of those houses in their gated communities with names like "Ponderosa Ridge" and "Bel Air Hills" and "The Meadowlands", gazing out across Silicon Valley from the squat skyline of San Jose to the string of lights on the quarry above Cupertino in the distance, taking a lungful of high-altitude rarefied rich-people air, and thinking, Okay... so, uh... what's on TV?
It's just another valley now, they say. It's no longer the playground and Mecca of nerdkind; it's just another place with Taco Bells and water parks and street crime and Apple Stores. It's nothing special.
Yeah... sure. Whatever you say.
I went on past the yuppie shopping center, with its Cosentino's instead of a Safeway, and on a whim turned left where the sidewalk veered away from Farnsworth where it wound through the canyon to the next valley up. The canyons here and the landscaping and the natural vegetation make it a place of palm trees, ground-cover bushes, little trees that are still trained along sticks and surrounded by cylinders of chicken wire, and wide swaths of cedar chips in the empty spaces. I swear, these bushes have little lamps inside them to illuminate their interiors. Just in the middle of the blocks, if "blocks" is the word. The sidewalk flew up the side of the hills above the road itself, winding between the manicured bushes, wide and smooth and paved like a nature trail for the rich. (The fence at the top of the hill, on the near side of the line of view houses, had a gate in it-- accessible only to people who leave Farnsworth, climb the sharply angled and curvaceous foot/bike path a couple hundred feet up the hill, and turn aside from the trail where a side path led to the fence.) Turning back from the highest point of the trail's serpentine ... uh, path, I could see all the way across the valley again; by that time, it was completely dark, and I had to use the backlight on my iPod to tell what the hell the name of the Angelique Kidjo song it had burped up the white earbud cords to me was. It also meant the houses in the canyon across from me-- in which I'm told most of the San Jose Sharks live-- showed up as curvy Eastern dragons of light below my vantage point.
I could get used to living up here, I thought. I wonder if any of these houses have dipped under a million bucks yet?
Probably not. But a guy can dream, can't he?
It was another hour before I got back home; my chosen route was circuitous and mostly darkened, and by the time I had found my way back to Nieman and its superfluous extra nineteen lanes, I was reeeeally wishing I'd put on some shoes. Sandals suck for extemporaneous five-mile hikes through the hills.
But now Sealab 2021 is on. And something one of the seals being pursued by sharks just said seems quite appropriate: Oh crap oh crap oh crap ohhh crap on a crap cracker!
Yeah-- sorry, just getting some incoherence out of my system, by way of shaking out the lead from the foregoing two or three weeks of inability to even get near this ol' blog. My attention span is going to need a bit of whupping back into shape.
Hot damn! O Canada is back on the Sunday night schedule. Oh, how do I love thee, Cartoon Network.
And they're showing The Big Snit. Oh, Lor bless you, Messrs. Lazzo and Crofford!
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