The Maverick Tribe

I've been away for the last week on the Yucatan Peninsula.  A much needed break from this increasingly depressing campaign.  I'll get back on the saddle soon.

Those of you Mavericktribesmen and -women who hang out with me on a regular basis know that my latest pursuit that I simply won't shut up about is capoeira.  Capoeira is a martial artform developed and practiced in Brazil by slaves of African descent (most are thought to trace their roots to Angola, and capoeira is probably derived from cultural traditions practiced there).  Stories about capoeira's genesis differ, but one theory holds that the slaves wanted to practice their fighting skills without their Portuguese slaveowners knowing, so they disguised their practice as a song and dance routine.  The art of capoeira is the result.

So anyway, in a couple weeks I'll be participating in my capoeira school's Batizado ("baptism"), where I'll be getting my color cord (similar to a particular color belt in karate).  At this time I'll be officially christened "Calango".   Don't ask me why I got this name... calango is the portuguese word for a type of lizard.  Is there something about me that's reptilian?  Well at least I didn't get Pao de Azucar ("sugarloaf"), which was (somewhat callously) given to a fellow newbie who is, shall we say, a tad on the chunky side.

Here's a taste of capoeira heavy on the acrobatics:

Here's a short reel about my school:

My favorite little 2-year-old Nico brought his parents Tina and Stefano to Hawaii recently.  Here he is showing them how to swim:

This photo belongs in a travel brochure with the caption: "Bask in the warm Kauai breeze with a 4-day/3-night package your whole family will love."

And, no, I'm not talking about Microsoft.  It's window time for "my" house.  The place is totally framed and the plywood sheathing is on there, so on Friday I learned what it takes to install a window.  I also learned how not to install a window, i.e., positioning and nailing it in without remembering to put on the flashing first.

I promised some pictures last time so here goes.

Here's more or less what it'll look like when it's done:

So today I put in another day at Habitat for Humanity.  This is the fourth time I've been out at the site.  Today we worked on putting up some plywood sheathing.  The first two floors are framed, and we spent a lot of time on what will eventually become the attic crawlspace.  I sharped my skills with power saws (circular, reciprocating).  By the end of the day my hammering arm was a little sore.

The Habitat crowd is about what you'd expect:  liberal, crunchy, hipster, generally vegan, and uniformly white.  At lunch someone loaned a Noam Chomsky book to someone else.  Another guy named JoJo, who probably dresses up like some sort of jester at the Renaissance Fair, went around asking everyone what their "spirit animal" was.  (His was the satyr-panda -- and no, I don't know what that is either.  He even drew a picture of one on plywood with his pencil.  All of it was slightly Napoleon Dynamite but without the autism.)  Someone else was chowing down on a "Soy-rizo", which is, as was explained to me, a meatless, soy-based version of chorizo.  Yum.

A freckly blonde gave me a personality test where she had me describe a cube, a sphere, a horse, and their relative placements to each other, and the sphere represents your life, and the color of the sphere represents your personality, and the horse represents... eh, who the fuck cares.  Building stuff is fun.

Here's a picture I found of some of the completed homes.  (I'll take my own pics the next time I go out.)

Today I volunteered for Habitat for Humanity.  One of my goals for the month of August was to do some volunteer work, and building a house seemed more rewarding than spooning out beef stew to the homeless.  Early this morning, I dragged myself out of bed and with apprehension made my way over to the constuction site, not knowing exactly what to expect.  (I have about as much experience with carpentry as Charles Bukowski had with sobriety.)

The site was in one of the many drab, foggy neighborhoods in San Francisco that most people never visit or even hear about.  Prosaic, square housing units crowd up against winding streets.  (These are, apparently, the scrappy and proud anti-Victorians.)  The occasional resident, usually Asian, ambles down the sidewalk.  Everywhere one looks, grey is the dominant color.

The houses already built by Habitat are, by contrast, cheerfully painted and architectually creative, if not particularly ornate.  They neither patronize nor condescend to the surrounding neighborhood.

The house we were working on was little more than a foundation.  The site was being supervised by a friendly lesbian named Erin (or Aaryn?  I don't know how lesbians spell it).  She looked tan and healthy, and born to wear a toolbelt.  The day pretty much went like this:

Erin/Aaryn:  Here's a shovel.  Dig this ditch.

Me:  Ok.

Erin/Aaryn:  Here's an industrial-size power drill.  Drill seventy holes in these 4-by-12's.

Me:  Ok.

Erin/Aaryn:  Here are some bags of cement mix.  Mix up some cement and pour it.

Me:  Ok.

And so on.  And I don't know what else I can say about this day except that I loved it.  It was the perfect antidote to sitting in cubicle, sifting through emails, worrying about PowerPoint decks.  Digging and moving dirt around was good exercise and meditative to boot.  Drilling all those holes nurtured my perfectist urges, as with each one I strived to manuever the drill such that the hole was exactly straight and precisely centered in the right place.

At the end of the day, my hands were sore, but in a satisfying way, not in that pinched, tense way one's hand and wrist get sore by operating a mouse.  As I thanked Erin/Aaryn and walked back to my car, I absently passed my hand over the burn in the back of my neck which was bright red.  And I recognized a strange, parental attachment to the house.  I wanted to see how it was going to grow, and have my hand in its development.  And most of all, I didn't want any of those hack volunteers of tomorrow to mess it up.

Well, as of the first of this month, I'm back living in Noe Valley.  It has been one of those years of going hither and thither, and I hope I'll be staying here for the time being.  I found a great house owned by a friendly guy named Rick, a stone's throw from where I lived around five years ago.

As I gaze into your eyes, bathed in moonlight, my naked body quivers, your ninja costume shuffles, and as Scott snaps a picture, I wonder, What will we say if a park ranger finds us?

Up here on my current little perch at Alamo Square I've been surveying a landscape fraught with peril lately.  First there was the Kadner family's havoc on the highways (the friend I'm staying with, Debra, and her brother both had serious auto accidents earlier this year), then there was the sudden death of local newsman Pete Wilson on Friday night (not to be confused with former California governor Pete Wilson).  Pete anchored the Channel 7 evening news and hosted an afternoon show on an affiliated talk radio network, KGO.  The man went in for hip replacement surgery and during it had a massive heart attack, which claimed his life.

I am haunted by this whole ordeal not because I'm a huge Pete Wilson fan or because I'm naive about the possibility of catastrophe on the operating table, or because Pete affected my life in any meaningful way.  But I was listening to his radio show just last Wednesday, his last day at work before the surgery.  And the final topic of discussion was his imminent surgery, where he invited listeners to call in and recount their operating room horror stories.  One caller claimed that doctors had inadvertantly left various pieces of hardware inside his cousin's abdominal cavity.  Another caller described having an adverse reaction to morphine wherein he was completely sentient to the pain of the surgery but couldn't move or speak.  Pete's colleague Gene Burns talked about the blood-curdling experience of doctors having to literally break his neck while he was under merely a local anaesthetic.  Listening to all these harrowing tales made Pete feel better for some reason. 

So there I was, at Debra's place, washing the windows, chuckling with Pete about these surgical mishaps.  That Pete would suffer the ultimate mishap was unbeknownst to both of us.

I've been back in San Francisco now for over a week.  And, long story short, I'm single again.  I'm hoping the second half of 2007 isn't quite the emotional rollercoaster that the first half was.