Bascomb's Regrets

I paid a dollar for the board, and I already had the paints and brushes… And when I presented the completed painting to the guys at Red’s Java House, they offered me free lunch. And if you know Red’s, you know that can be almost a five dollar value. So, if you don’t count the four hours of squinting into the sun, I was well ahead. Until I got back to the car: $60 parking ticket! I’ll try again tomorrow with Mark…

With Lormot in West Chester, PA, I’ve been spending days at a time in my BatCave, writing Facebook and Android apps and becoming paler and paler. Yesterday I remembered my promise to have the car’s interior shampooed, and with luck I was out doing it in the middle of the day. An hour and a half to kill; it would have taken me a half-hour to get anywhere anyhow, so I just puttered around in the vicinity of the car wash. First I visited the pound and talked to all the dogs up for adoption. (They live well in San Francisco’s Animal Adoption Center. Lots of pit bulls. Pit bulls look friendlier when they’re not dragging a human around.) Took a stroll down the aisle at Best Buy: still no Wii’s for sale; and what used to be the satellite radio / car alarm section has been transformed into a navi system bonanza. Rainbow for oatmeal and beets and kale.

And then I made a daring leap. You know that place on S Van Ness, the old burger stand, never any customers–the kind of place that’s evidence that San Francisco has never seen a riot of any kind (it would have been demolished: you could take the place apart with an eight-ounce hammer and a set of sockets). Turns out: pretty good cheeseburgers.

A few weeks ago Dean and I planned to paint / sketch the view of Pier 38. I showed up over an hour late, and his work day had already begun. So, enthralled by Barge Patricia and yoga-for-the-homeless, I hunkered down in the wet shadow of Pier 40 on a floating dock. Five hours, one trip to the paint store, and one barbecue later, I was finished. (In spite of the funky perspective, marine traffic and the VERTIGO I got from the moving platform, I was satisfied enough to ‘go public’ with it. It’s hanging on the wall at LabZero, the office on the far left of the panting.)