I am back in California, having come from Tennessee where I was visiting my dad and my good friend Emma, and before that my hometown where I was more or less alone for a week. It was cold and rainy the whole time but I felt all right about it. I have been so beat down and tired so having no alternative to being inside or driving around drinking cheap coffee or otherwise doing nothing was OK with me.

I flew to SFO early Thursday and got to San Francisco in the evening. Laura met me at her apartment and we went to Traitor Joe’s and got Food and Snacks and then came home and drank coffee and watched movies. I did not want to move from the couch and so I stayed till Sunday and then took the evening ferry to Vallejo:

McCune picked me up at the dock and we drove to the Black Fortress where he lives and I saw my friend Beezer the cat, who is triple the size since I last saw her in November:

I have spent the last two days driving down to Oakland with McCune to work out of Hesher’s Pizza, which is his pizza place in Jack London Square. These are probably the last nice days here until the rain comes in late December, so I went walking in Berkeley after I got off work. It always makes me feel a little sadness to be there even though I love it so much. I reckon it is because I have a bone-deep certainty that I will never live there again. I will always be a visitor. That and it is such a drag that all the movie theaters are gone from downtown . . . McCune and I used to go to the California Theatre every other week, back before the Bay Area turned into a total nightmare. Its corpse is still there just off Shattuck, still haunting me with its emptiness. Well . . . at least the leaves looked nice.

Also, Ruby Room is closing, so I need to go one last time before bury my favorite bar ever:

What a total bummer. I’ve been going there for something like thirteen years, and have had many strange nights there just brooding in the red darkness with all the freaks from the Old Oakland. I miss them. I think I’ve been there on any substance you can think of . . . and, JUST SAYING, it was always good place to hang out with a cute girl. I was always there. It was my satellite office, kind of like how Philip Marlowe gets all his calls sent to the bar near his house.

I have a dark suspicion that this sort of thing is going to keep happening to me and everyone else for the rest of our lives, which is to say all the stuff we have loved will eventually perish. What can you do.

What I will do is go to Piedmont Springs with my friend Sahar next week. We’re going to get lifted on the spooky stuff and hang out in neck-deep hot water for an hour. She’s never been! It’s gonna be real cute.

THOUGH YEAH: I am going to spend Christmas with Laura and then the McCunes before I head to Little Rock to go on tour with my friends from Chalk Talk. If you’re in any of the cities we’re passing through, come on by and say hey. Why not?? And where are we going? To answer that question, my friend Fia knitted this:

They tell me there is a definite possibility that my baby brother Tower McCune will be born before I split. By this weekend, Jojo will be entering the Hot Zone, which means Tower could emerge at any time. They’re going to have a home birth, so I figure if that comes to pass I’ll take off for the night. No one wants my dumb ass standing around like a mouth-breathing putz as the midwife leans over the bathtub and delivers unto us an infant child whose birth was foretold in the Elder Days. If it’s early enough, I’ll go to a movie theater and bear witness to whatever godless trash they got playing right now. There are worse fates.

Anyway . . . here are some pictures from the last week. It’s three in the morning and I’ve probably averaged three to four hours of sleep a night, so I guess I will now continue that tradition. Maybe I’ll get some of that deep restorative sleep this weekend. Or anyway that’s the lie I tell myself. Good-night! ☆彡