Rambling

Been a little distracted over the last few days ... rather consumed by two long-time best friends in town, and the typo referenced a few days ago.

DH and I met at Cal in an introductory Indonesian language class in 1985. He has globe-trotted ever since, and whenever he stops off in SF we take a long drive either up or down the coast. This time we went to Santa Cruz with a stop in Half Moon Bay for green eggs and ham at a nice little place. We abandoned our former preferred breakfast place ... can't for the life of me remember the name ... because it moved and that seems to have drained at least the aesthetic funk of the place. Besides, we would have been condemned to wait for half an hour with an unusually dour lot of larger-than-they-oughtta-be burbanites out slumming for authenticity in the tickitty-boo Half Moon Bay. By all of that, I mean that we snottily thought ourselves better than the other customers.

We picked the rather cooler place down the street. The waitresses were all young women with tons of hair, frankly amply endowed, and humorless to a fault. The busboys were all fetching young men who never stood still. The bartender was a stud. Seems to be some sort of hiring paradigm at work. The green eggs and ham were passable.

So it was on to Santa Cruz via HIghway 1, a favorite drive in my amazingly peppy '86 Honda Civic. DH opined that no economist has come close to assessing the true cost of the Iraq War. We agree that it is the single greatest blunder in American history. DH states that the U.S. has spent an additional 5 trillion dollars on oil .. he compared barrel prices pre-war and now, and he discounts world demand increases because he states that production has kept pace.

Certainly it is amazing how lily-livered most of the commentary remains even as we come to the sickening realization of how colossal the idiocy at the top has been. Keith Olbermann and Jon Stewart are far ahead in terms of their sharpness. I like the curiously muscular Anderson Cooper, but he retains a phony "balance" in the face of an irreducible imbalance of evidence. There comes a time when we have to call things by their real names.

When we got to to Santa Cruz, I managed to maneuver us into a permanent traffic jam by the beach ... it turned out that everyone was lining up to get into two or three parking lots, but the good city managers of laid-back Santa Cruz have not managed to figure out how to do this without creating gridlock by the pleasure fair. Ludicrous. We nevertheless enjoyed the views, the eye candy, the opportunity to reflect on the crassness and the gaudy beauty of a great amusement park. I vowed to come back one rainy Sunday next winter with dog and camera to photograph the place.

I eventually wormed back to the "historic downtown" and we walked the length of the street and back. The photos are from some hoardings.

DH is one of the best conversationalists I have ever known. We once drove a friend's car from San Francisco to New York via New Orleans in five days, and that included the only 24 hours I ever spent in the Big Easy ... the conversation never flagged even for a moment.

We had a long slow drive back up the coast talking about our lives, and ended up having dinner at the home of the other old friend in town at the moment. Time shooting the breeze with old friends is the best time.

Photos by Arod.