When I was a young boy I used to order “signed” baseballs out of magazines. I use dismissive quotation marks here because they were really just stamped on facsimiles of signatures. The balls came in cheap plastic display cases and even at what I remember to be around 15 dollars were probably vastly over priced.   Much to my parents’ credit though, they would, from time to time, allow me order such a novelty item. Perhaps it was because of how I waited. If you have ever ordered any novelty mail order good then you know that there is a lot of waiting involved. My econ professor in college admitted to getting drunk and ordering some sort of sandwich maker at two in the morning and receiving it six months later without any clue as to why.  Similarly, these baseballs were promised somewhere between six weeks and just before I you lost interest in baseball.   After about a week I would start sitting outside in the front yard from when I got home until five. Truth be told, I enjoyed being in my front yard.  But there’s something about a kid hanging out waiting for the mail man that just gets to parents.

Things have come a long way since then and Amazon now tells you within about a day when you’ll be receiving your next novelty item. Didn’t you know? Dead tree books are like sculptures of blogs. It’s a kind of origami that uses stitching. As you may know, I am a huge fan of a certain blog that is written by the previously mysterious Bike Snob NYC. Ever since I began reading it I have said that I would like to compensate him for his work somehow beyond sending him links to things for his quizzes. So it was that I went to sleep last night comforted by the knowledge that I would most likely rush home from work today and find the most recent Snob x Paper collabo waiting for me. I slept the sleep of a child who has already peeked at his Christmas gifts but has parents that are clumsy enough to misplace them during the transition from their closet to the tree. Well, they made it. Here is what I saw when I got home.

The first thing I noticed after I ripped this book from it’s protective covering was that it is small.  Perhaps that is because it was built for performance.  I immediately decided to take some measurements.

In keeping with convention I opted to use sunglasses and improvised as necessary.

As you can see, the book is about one pair of sun glasses wide.

And one and a half eyes wide.  I couldn’t take a picture of the most important dimension, width, because I had to measure it in cell phones and I was capturing the images with mine.  It was two HTC Ozones thick FYI.  I tried to weigh it but since my scale is set to babies, it wouldn’t register.

This bodes well for a quick, snappy read.  I expect it to accelerate great in the bathroom.

When I was a young boy I used to order "signed" baseballs out of magazines. I use dismissive quotation marks here because they were really just stamped on facsimiles of signatures. The balls came in cheap plastic display cases and even at what I remember to be around 15 dollars were probably ...

One of my favorite things about San Francisco is how health conscious everyone is. I don’t mean that Los Angeles health consciousness either where you can go to a restaurant and tell the waiter you’re trying to eat healthy and he’ll give you a knowing look, leave without taking your order, and reappear holding a large bowl of ice cubes and an ornate set of tongs. No, people here are always lauding the benefits of granola and “good fats” and scrutinizing my menu selections by way of bio-chemistry. Even if their advice turns out to be misguided they still aren’t wrong because they have succeeded in creating a healthy body image.

It is this relaxed and, depending on how you look at it, classic or advanced view of health that allows San Franciscans establishments to have resident animals. As someone who has had pets for most of their life and less than exemplary kitchen maintenance I personally see no problem with a cafe worker petting their dog before preparing my food but it is still surprising to see how common the resident cat or dog is here. After all, I assume that most of the sophisticated people living here don’t share my sentiment that any meal where they avoid giving themselves food poisoning is a step up. As far as I know the FDA still exists in San Francisco; but, now that I think of it, I can’t actually recall seeing grades displayed in any windows.

The phenomenon of the resident animal is not limited to the food services industry, they can be found anywhere from book stores to other book stores. Any such establishment is a guaranteed “STD” candidate, especially if you are currently living sans pet. Being near an establishment with a resident animal is much like being the cool aunt or uncle. You get to enjoy all the perks of hanging out with a baby like having an excuse to play with legos or model trains and a peek-a-boo partner is never far away. All of this is entirely on your own terms though and there is absolutely no excrement to deal with. So far I have only found two caveats to my resident animal relationships and they are quite minor and should be common sense for anyone who has any experience with animals.

1. A cat is still a cat no matter the setting and a keyboard by any other name is still as comfy.
Yes, the love affair between cats and keyboards has been extensively documented and you would do well not to forget it.

These are just a few images from the historical cheezburger archives and they are why I build an extra thirty minutes into any visit to Local 123 on San Pablo. Local 123 is an ordinary coffee shop which I would normally write off as overpriced, especially considering their inconsistent internet connection, but their outdoor back patio and resident cat Billy the Braggart have helped establish it as a standard in my cafe migration pattern. Here is some documentation of a recent trip I took there

2. Like a sarcastic gay man, kitty has claws. A recent post gym visit to Comic Relief on Shattuck for a casual Brian Wood fueled comic read/pet sesh took a tragic turn when their resident cat got his claw caught in my the basketball shorts. As the feline in question, who I have not yet named, became increasingly alarmed, so too did I. I tried to calmly extract his paws from my shorts but this proved impossible once the proprietor saw what appeared to be a frantic interaction between his cat and my crotchal region. The upside of this was that he didn’t seem to take any issue with the fact that I had effectively read a DMZ trade in his store. Maybe this point should be retitled “cats are masters at misdirection.”

In any event, I highly recommend that if you find yourself simply sitting in your apartment, get up and set out for someplace. It doesn’t matter where. Even if you find yourself just walking into stores, which is something that makes me feel guiltily unimaginative and brainwashed at the same time, you may just find a resident animal that makes everything better. A pet, especially one that isn’t yours, doesn’t care if you have no job; they only care that you are warm and are wearing soft clothes. These priorities are something we could all stand to be reminded of once in a while.

*If anyone knows how to insert photos without having them get included in a gallery please let me know in a comment.

To enlarge a gallery photo click it, then click it again. For those who have seen Zombieland, “double tap.”

One of my favorite things about San Francisco is how health conscious everyone is. I don't mean that Los Angeles health consciousness either where you can go to a restaurant and tell the waiter you're trying to eat healthy and he'll give you a knowing look, leave without taking your order, and reappear ...

I’m going to resist the urge to write a prolonged introduction for this series, especially since I abandon projects so often that my introductions tend to eclipse the compiled content of the efforts they precede. All you need to know is that since I moved to Berkeley I have been blogging less and less. I blame this trend on many different factors in my life but the most important for my segue is that I simply haven’t been feeling excited about things. I’ve been nervous about very mundane real life things without enjoying the type of unhappiness that breeds artistic breakthroughs and necessitates innovation. Thanks a lot for believing in, reassuring, and supporting me Mom and Dad, you’re making this a real bitch you know.

I thought I wasn’t being excited by things in the same way I used to be and I was right. I am being excited by things in a different way. A smaller way. A link friendlier way. I only just realized it tonight during Lit Quake’s “Lit Crawl.” While I have not been unhappy, I have been having plenty of mostly fruitless days that rank somewhere in the range between bleary and vacant on my new scale of bright to Oedipal eyes. What keeps me from gouging out my eyes besides my glasses? What stops me from having “making a lasagna for one” eyes on the BART ride home? All sorts of tiny things that are generally so fleeting that I don’t remember to mention them to anyone. I’d like to try to assemble these little things that save my day here. As long as I have your attention, I wouldn’t mind seeing “STD” become the new “FTW.”

Obviously that’s a pretty drawn out introduction but it’s just as obvious that I’m leaving it. A published blog post is kind of like a time travel movie where the protagonist succeeds because they know they’ve already succeeded. I guess what I’m trying to say is that like time travel movies, blogs are stupid.

Actually, what I’m trying to say is that Lit Quake could have been awful but a number of things SAVED. THE. DAY. I love things like Lit Crawl but unfortunately I hate going to them. First, I generally end up going alone which means that I have to sit or stand awkwardly while everyone else socializes. When I’m not trying to unhear pretentious or inane chatter I am trying to suppress the urge to jump into someone’s interesting conversation, thus revealing that I am a creepy eavesdropper. I saw a number of great readers over the course of the evening but I’d like credit Matt Baume and especially Ramona Emerson with saving the day. This was the event that most interested me and the fact that I enjoyed it so much propelled me through the rest of the evening.

While Twitter allowed me to look occupied for a large portion of the half hour leading up to the reading, it wasn’t perfect and I ended up people watching. My wandering eye landed upon a girl with a ribbon in her hair, or did it. I spent most of my non Twittering time trying to figure out if that streak was a ribbon or a dyed plaited braid. This may sound weird but the fact that I couldn’t tell brought my eyes to “slightly wider” on my new system; which, I should say, is still in closed beta while we work on balancing it. It was just another sign that there’s still mystery in the world and brought home the idea that although there was a room full of people, ostensibly doing the same thing, for the same reason, none of us was having the same experience. How cool is that? I spent the remainder of my non Twittering time thinking about how to say, “I like your hair” without actually saying “I like your hair.” Because, while I think I’m a relatively fashion conscious person, I am certainly not a particularly hair conscious person. Sure, I’ve told my friend Lauren that she has great hair but that’s not weird, you’d have to be blind not to see that. I saw Charlie’s Angels once and there was that skinny guy who kept cutting off Drew Barrymore’s hair and I just couldn’t understand it. So I think by now we’ve established that I’m not keeping ziplocked bags full of hair in my room or anything and we can move on.

Ramona was already guaranteed a spot on this series before I even knew that she was going to read or that she was hilarious. Her selections from her blog were easily both the most innately funny and humorously delivered pieces I heard all night. Almost every speaker at the first event I attended devoted their time to talking about getting negative comments on their blog and how this was ultimately not a bad thing. Honestly, I was expecting a little something more than that from an event called “collisions on the information super highway.” Even if you have a blog where the main readership consists of your mother, chances are you’ve already been called anything from “a fukking idiot” to “a hemeroide on the eart’s asshole.” (Baume made the good point that it’s not the commenter’s responsibility to be coherent. I would like to add that they aren’t responsible for spelling either.) While I don’t think I have any comments on this blog, I certainly do on other pieces I’ve written. I think the most recent one I got said that I was writing like I wanted Robert Bowling’s balls on my tongue. The point is, every blogger still blogging has had negative comments and understood that they weren’t bad. They are what make me envious of the fact that people like Ramona are good at punctuating and they are what make me travel the four hundred miles from Los Angeles to San Francisco with my sixth grade grammar book taking up part of my limited luggage space.

I was appreciative of the fact that Ramona didn’t spend a lot of her time on that and instead talked about Facebook and introduced us to the idea of under cover bad ass, but where she really saved the day was on my way home. I hadn’t eaten dinner before Lit Quake and I didn’t want to buy anything so I was that special type of grumpy that comes when a person of privilege is hungry when I watched my train leave without me. I had sunk to the floor, back to the staircase, when a guy in fur anklets and sandals walked by me. If you haven’t taken a look at a SF edition tarot pack, the “Bear’s Ankle” card is a bad omen that indicates hipsters in your future. Sure enough I was soon overhearing an attempt to break the record for use of “bourgeoisie” in a conversation and there was a girl complaining that she didn’t find San Francisco’s public transportation to be “transcendent” the way Europe’s is. I pulled out my phone, brought up Not So Serious, and it all went away. I laughed, I smiled, I “hmmm”ed. Thanks for saving my day Not So Serious.

I'm going to resist the urge to write a prolonged introduction for this series, especially since I abandon projects so often that my introductions tend to eclipse the compiled content of the efforts they precede. All you need to know is that since I moved to Berkeley I have been blogging less and ...