Started to Share Stories

On the thirtieth of January I wrote that I left work thinking I was done with work.  I rode to RWC in the rain and made the 553 train.  I went to 22nd and took Duboce but realized that that isn’t much fun.  At my friend’s apartment it turned out her roommate was out but his guest was still visiting--he helped with dinner, which was similar to the dinner I had made on Tuesday.

He was especially talkative and I had a good conversation with them.  I walked to Uptown to meet my buddy and saw the bartender that I knew.  He was finishing up his shift and having register problems.  The new shift had just come on.  I sat away from the regulars this time because there were so few places to sit.

I told him about my new developments and he was impressed.  I told him that I thought it was my job to make the rounds.  Meanwhile, my buddy was having trouble getting up Mission Street but when he finally arrived the bartender bought both of us a bunch of drinks.  I told my buddy about the birds and he told me he was considering a move to Atlanta.

In the morning of the day that I wrote this.  I put on the suit I had found in SR and though I wasn’t happy with it at first it turned out alright.  My friend and I thought we were late when we went over to 16th together but we discovered that our planning assumed that we may be late.  My riding partner and his wife were on the exact same car as us.

We sat together smiling and pointing at each other until Lake Merritt where we met a beared guy we knew on the escalator.  My friend knew him but I was blown away that we were riding around with the guy who had originated the SF Tweed ride.  He said that a famous cyclist had come to the first ride in a suit with reflectors woven into the fabric.  He showed me his jacket at Blue Bottle- it had a bunch of punk rock stuff.  He said that he had gone to the Edwardian Ball previously but not most recently.

My partner’s wife was worried we were late but when we arrived at the station we met our academic traveling companion and his old college buddy the structural engineer that, again, our planning had deceived us and we still had about a half an hour.  I noted that the train’s commander was wearing jeans but the conductors wore uniforms.

We boarded as a group but the academic ran for bagels and when he returned we were ready to leave.  As the train pulled out I remember we started to share stories. The academic told us about his career and shared his Twitter profile picture with us and said the artist was an SF muralist who had studied under Diego Rivera and had a lot of connections to the current muralist community.

The engineer told us he worked in San Mateo.  He said that he had previously been working in Bakersfield for a firm owned by Native Americans that was really just a front.  He said it was a job meant to tide him over through the recession.  He and the academic recalled a bar called Trout’s which was apparently the oldest Okey bar in California that still exists.

We had oranges and chocolate.  The conductor made a joke about my partner’s wife’s bike falling over and she believed him.  My friend sent a tweet and we learned that there had been a lady that had been interested in attending the Sacramento Tweed ride with us.

This is an occasional series chronicling my life. This Notebook Analysis series is meant to be contemporaneous piece developed as an agglomeration of my notebook pages. In each of these posts I used my notes to develop my recent thoughts.