Carmel by the Sea

While Clint is no longer the mayor, it’s not like his work is done. There are 7,361 families in Carmel by the Sea who are living barely above the poverty line at US$912,000 a year. So before you go to sleep tonight take some time to say a prayer for the disadvantaged who are forced to live in the urban squalor (below) that is Carmel.

San Francisco

According to a recent census, there are officially three redheads in the state of California. And, just my luck, I got to go to a hockey game with two of them. As you can see in the pic below, two redheads and two deadheads (follickly speaking). Left to right that’s Poppy Loopy, Sweet Loo, Rooster Cogburn and yours truly carrying an unprecedented amount of heft just so I won’t feel so out of place in the super-size-me U.S. of A.

The Sweet One is incandescent. He rotates between Wanchai and Polk Street. One minute he’s in Hong Kong, the next he’s lounging in his palatial San Francisco digs. And yes San Francisco, Sweet Loo is indeed bi. Bi-coastal, that is.

This is a picture from high above Loo-ville somewhere off Polk Street.

Things have certainly changed in this hood, at least they have since the close to 20 years ago when I last lived in San Francisco. Polk Street was a tad rough, in an S & M way. Now it’s full of hopped up java hounds hoping to catch a sideways glance of their chiselled reflection in a shiny hubcap or two. There are scads of trendy bistros and a couple of chi-chi health clubs, which are magnets to the legions of shapely female hipsters uniformly clad in black-tights. But there is little eye contact from most folk on Polk. Where Sweet Loo, the merry fartmaker, fits in to this gentrified genome is anybody’s guess. Ah, but that’s far too much introspection for this hillbilly cat.

Fortunately, we found a pretty damn crisp sports bar no more than a minute or two from the Sweet One’s pad. There had to be about 20 TV’s beaming and they were featuring everything from high def college hockey to a command performance of Snooky and his paunchy mate’s throwing darts somewhere south of Newcastle in what passes for riveting viewing in England.

Back to the puck. As mentioned earlier, we did make it to a hockey game in beautiful downtown San Jose between my once beloved Chicago Blackhawks and the local Sharks. The Sharks are a very good team who are well supported (way too much money in the Silicon Valley). The Sharks still seem to be missing some sizzle and hockey is hardly on the radar in the Bay Area, anyway. So it’s no surprise that The San Francisco Chronicle, a newspaper whose mediocrity has clearly stood the test of time yet is still the largest rag in the region, no longer has a full time Sharks beat writer.

And it’s also no surprise that both Poppy Loopy and Sweet Loo were attending their first live NHL game while the Rooster claims to be a long time Rangers fan, which is not to be confused with an actual hockey fan.

So it was with great relish that I had to tutor my less enlightened friends, although Sweet Loo claims I grew impatient when he asked me if there was a reason why three guys jumped over the boards together to replace three guys coming off the ice. I told him they had something called forward lines in hockey (a center and two wingers) and defence pairings (self explanatory). He didn’t like my tone and claimed that the players could hear me ridiculing him. Here’s why:

We sat in the first row behind the players bench. But eventually Loo was feeling so emboldened by my hockey tutorials that he started giving a hand to Sharks coach Ron Wilson (in pic above), helping him with line changes and the like. Well it was all so much fun, don’t you know, that we had to order us up a slew of beers and get blind, which was very appropriate considering we couldn’t see a damn thing on the ice with all the players and coaches in front of us anyway.


The funniest part was watching the Sharks Jeremy Roenick, who is about 108 years old and was once a colossal star for the Hawks back in the 80's and 90's, playing about two minutes all game and getting roughed up when he was out there.















I know most of you have no clue who this guy is, or was. But I always liked JR and was shocked to see him sitting one foot away on the other side of the glass. I thought he had retired three years ago and judging by his lack of ice time, the Sharks coach must have figured he had retired as well.

Maybe we were having too much fun, I don’t know, but towards the end of the first period I saw the Hawks Martin Havlat, a paragon of futility because he is the teams highest paid player and also their laziest, standing in front of the Sharks bench and staring right at me. Next thing I know out of the corner of my eye comes a flying puck heading right towards us. Now there were 17,496 people at the game and only one got hit in the head with a puck. Any guesses who? No, not me. Despite my altered state I have been to enough pewee and junior B games over the years to know that you duck first and ask questions later. But Sweet Loo, well this was his first game.

The puck had been deflected up over the bench and came screaming down right on us. Loo saw it at the last second and managed to get his hand up to his coconut in time to take the brunt of the impact. But it still hurt. I picked the puck up and thought, wow, first time I got a puck at an NHL game. Stood up and waved it at the crowd, looking for my TV time, while medics rushed in. But next to Loo was some kid with his dad and the most longing look in his eyes. He was almost tearing up. I asked Loo if there was any blood and he said no. So I gave the puck to the kid. Really, I had no friggin’ choice because half the arena was watching us now on the Jumbotron.


We said goodbye to Sharks captain and former MVP Joe Thornton and joined Poppy and the Rooster in some primo seats five rows up from the ice that had been occupied by a couple of techno-corpo-Silicon Valley-wankers from Google or Yahoo who knew nothing about hockey, never even bothered to look at the ice, but still had to put in a token appearance anyway and were gone two minutes into the second period.

These are odd fans in San Jose. By the third period of a tie game, they were kind of quiet. But not me. I was up on my feet giving the Hawks shit for most of the game and god knows they deserved it. Dainty Duncan Keith, the Hawks lone all-star and a smooth skating defenceman who is adverse to any bodily contact it seems, kept passing up open looks at the net to make the perfect pass. I couldn’t take it any longer and finally stood up and yelled at him: “Shoot the puck, you can’t score unless you shoot the damn thing!” Well of course he heard me because the joint was basically silent and everyone sitting around us was staring at me. “Look at that crazy guy, drinking beer, screaming and yelling. Must think he’s at a hockey game or something.” Sure enough, next time down ice dainty Duncan tees up a shot from the point right in front of us and pounds in a goal to tie up the game. Naturally I had to take a bow and was going to go check with the official scorer to see if I got an assist on the goal. Some knucklehead two rows up started yelling “Shoot the puck, you can’t score unless you shoot.” And he started laughing and so did everybody around him. And he kept it up and kept it up and kept it up. ZZZZZZZZZZZ. Hey junior, I told him, it was funny two weeks ago. Let it go. The Rooster said no problem on the Hawks goal, “We’re still going to beat you.” We?

The teams went to overtime, then a shoot-out which the Sharks won because the Hawks suck. Oh and 108 year old Jeremy Roenick scored the winner for the Sharks in the shoot out. Ha. Damn.


But a good time was had by all, with Poppy and Sweet Loo saying this was the most fun they had ever had at a sporting event. OK, enough puck. The Hawks suck. But you already know that, don’t you?

California

I am going to get ahead of myself here. The pic above is from lunch at Nepenthe in Big Sur. That glass of Pinot cost $14. Ouch. But according to my blog below I am freezing in unpretensious Portland and not in California yet and certainly not in Big Sur, so let's digress ever so slightly you cosmic warriors... Okay, well wow, here I am finally in the Golden State. I was so anxious to get out of the cold that I drove 13 hours straight from Portland all the way to Rooster Cogburn’s sprawling abode in Marin. I would never advise anyone to try this unless they are blessed with a superhuman gene or two or unless you are freezing your ass off in the Pacific Northwest. After two hours of blinding rain leaving Portland, I found out the number 5 interstate was closed in southern Oregon because of snow so I had to snake my way out of the state through Grants Pass (below, in better days).


Visibility was neglible. It was wet, windy, foggy, hilly, unbelievably beautiful and ridiculously treacherous. All that and more is Grants Ass. Sorry, Grants Pass. By the time I got out of the haze and emerged to the Pacific Ocean at the tip-top of California, my relief was palpable. It was Cali now and visions of gorgeous scenery, tasty grape and fortifying chow were dancing in my tired old head. I saw the ocean and envisioned cruising south as the moonlight lyrically bounced off the Pacific illuminating my journey. Yeah, well so much for a poetic return to California and all that Kerouc-ian bullshit because I saw the ocean for a grand total of two minutes before heading into that foreboding black hole known as night time on the Redwood Highway for the next seven hours. I didn’t see the ocean again for two days. Made it to Marin in time to have a drink with Baron Von Rooster and his neighbour George Lucas at about 2 a.m. Portland? Did someone say Portland? Never heard of it.

Portland

You have to see Portland first hand to appreciate what a one-horse town it is. Some of you will remember the philosopher king Keith Jacobson who once resided in Hong Kong and now calls the rugged terrain of Portland home. According to Jake, Portland is very unpretentious and happily so. This damp little corner is so damn unpretentious that the day I arrive in town The Oregonian, not only the paper of record in Portland but the paper of record for the whole friggin’ state, clears out the top half of the front page to run a photo of the Trailblazers Brandon Roy and their remarkable come from behind victory over the Atlanta hawks. Now the Hawks are perpetually putrid and going into the game against the Blazers they were 18-21. To lose to them on your home court is unthinkable. So it would have to be a major sense of relief when the home team comes back from a 19 point deficit to eke out a win with a last second shot. It’s the type of win where a good team runs off the court as quick as possible and says: hot damn, we was lucky to win. In Portland, the win became front page news. Jake says Portland does not aspire to be bigger and better. It has no ambitions to be the center of the universe. Mission accomplished.

But you know Jake, not everybody in Portland is happy to be a hillbilly. A few do have global aspirations and one of them undoubtedly is Phil Knight, Dr. Frankenstein of the omnipresent Nike empire. Employees like to speak of Nike’s culture. But let’s get rid of the “ure” and call it what it really is: the Nike cult. At least among the younger and idealistic employees it is a cult. They would give blood for Phil and for Tiger and for His Airness and for Bo Knows and for Johnny Mac and so on and so on. That’s why I am lucky that my good friends at Nike are old and cynical. Not only have they been around the block a few times, they have been around the globe a few times. CB is a swoosh legend in China. He is so close to Knight that he can trim Phil’s nose hairs. JW watches more sports than any human in the universe and has for 50 plus years.

On a ridiculously frigid day JW takes me on a tour of the Nike Campus in Beaverton, Oregon. Frankly, there are worse places to work.

JW works in the Mia Hamm Building, which is not far from the Michael Jordan which is across the courtyard from the Tiger. You get the picture. You ain’t nobody in Nikeville unless you have your own building.

Jake left Nike five years ago to work for Adidas and naturally claims he has never been happier. As you can see from the photos below, despite working for rival companies now JW and Jake are still so tight that they take turns sleeping. Teamwork. CB and myself managed to stay awake for both pics, which ain't easy in "unpretentious" Portland.

And just in case you called, I ain't there anymore. One morning I went down for breakfast in my hotel the Heathman, which houses one of the more chic restaraunts in town I am told, and took my phone out of my pocket and put it on the table as I always do. For some reason I went upstairs without it only to realize 10 minutes later the error of my ways and swooped back down to retrieve it. But I was told by the staff that it was now gone. So sorry. They checked with the bus boy to see if he had mistakenly picked it up when he was clearing the table and I told them if the bus boy mistook my phone for a dirty dish then he's probably calling his wife right now with a spoon. You know, this is America and I chose to come here so there is nobody to blame but me. But if this was a nice bistro in Asia and my phone disappeared, the manager would have rifled through the bags of half his staff to find it. Not here, not now. So don't try my Hong Kong phone for the next two months because someone in Portland is eating their cereal with it.





No trip here is complete without a visit to Troutdale, Oregon. Some of you more savvy travellers will no doubt recognize my car in front of Jack's Snack and Tackle, a Troutdale fixture for many years. Well ok, I have seen it all. I'm out of here and on my way to California.