A Little West Brain Thinking:

Sorry to be late this week; I've been on California time, attending my annual web guru potlatch in San Francisco. Nice place to take a few extra days to recover from "Death by Powerpoint," the unofficial theme of all modern conferences, it seems. Terry and I took in the Muir Woods on Monday. What a comfort, in one's fifties, to walk among beings that are more than a thousand years old. They're a little shaggy, fire-scarred and crack-limbed--but so are we. And we visited Golden Gate Park and the Haight a few decades later than originally planned, but the 200-year-old bronze Buddha in the Japanese Tea Garden hadn't budged an inch. City Lights is still full of great books, the Stinking Rose still serves chicken roasted with forty cloves of garlic, and Chinatown's designer still exhibits a marked preference for red and gold. And of course the godstruck, the addled and the addicted still carry their many hungers through the blessedly mild streets, bumming bucks, butts, and burgers, talking to the air, and providing a much-needed route to salvation for the affluence-afflicted.