Saturday, May 6, 2023

Improvement appears to be "sticking"

 I stayed up all night because I wanted to go look at a shakuhachi in South San Francisco. I left here around 8:30 in the morning and rode over to Whole Foods. They didn't have the full breakfast buffet out but what they appear to do is cook up a lot of bacon/egg/cheese croissants, cut them in half, and have them out at the hot bar. Easy grab and go breakfast.

My croissant and a bottle of coffee cost me a bit over $14, but admittedly a bit over $4 was the coffee, and the croissant was top-rate. I was surprisingly hungry and at least discarded the top half of the croissant for the birds. 

I went over to Diridon Station and although I'd downloaded it the night before and printed it out, my CalTrain schedule wasn't right but it was close enough. I had almost an hour to kill at the station and I passed it, apparently, by giving bad information out to certain semi-lost ladies who were just in town to sing (I think?) in a choir composed of long-time San Jose State University alumni. I told her Clipper cards can be obtained from the VTA office downtown or, maybe, from Whole Foods because I put money on my card there. It turns out you can buy them from the Clipper machines there at the station. 

Eventually the train came, and we took a very short ride to Santa Clara Station. It's where the bus bridge began. And here it got weird. I lived in Sunnyvale for years and am well familiar with the northern part of that city and the route we took from Santa Clara to Sunnyvale looped all over the place. The bus was supposed to just visit the usual train stops so there was no reason to loop around like that. 

The ride from Sunnyvale to Mountain View was even weirder, as we passed the same restaurant twice. It was nuts. I saw parts of Mountain View and Palo Alto I'd never seen before and the California street stop didn't even seem to be near the California street CalTrain station at all. 

We finally got to Menlo Park, cool and almost foggy, and in 10 minutes or so got on another CalTrain. That one took its time getting up to South San Francisco but I eventually got there. I had a mile or so walk to where I needed to meet the guy with the shakuhachi, a Starbucks, and I decided to pass. One of the authors of one of the Westerner-meets-shakuhachi books, Ray Brooks, spoke of beginning with a turned wooden shakuhachi he called a "bed post" and I've seen 'em around, turned out of ash I think, the same wood used to make baseball bats. I thought it would be neat to have one, but I could see why Brooks was so happy to move on from his.

Ah well, no biggie, a lot of this was just to have something interesting to do on the weekend. I walked back to the train station and rode the train to good old Menlo Park again, and then since I was going to get off at Palo Alto, I sat next to a young guy (so I had the outer seat) so I'd not have to ask someone to get up when I did.

The guy and I got talking, and he was from Germany, Munich in fact, and I'd been there and we hit it off talking about all sorts of things. He was getting off at Palo Alto too, and was here - for the first time - to do an internship for a few months. He was to meet his friend at the "Stanford oval" and when we got off I got him pointed the right way and we wished each other well. 

I walked in from the train station just far enough to get an espresso and use the loo at a little coffee shop, then decided there was not that much I needed to do in Palo Alto unless I was there to busk, so I went back, through the train station and to the bus station where I was happy to see the #522 runs on weekends. It's a Limited, that only stops at the major stops. 

And here I'll add that it was my observation all along that Who is riding public transportation on a weekend tends to be those who are not doing that well in life. Young Germans visiting our shores to make history in genetic science aside, there's a greater weight than normal in the numbers of people who are not winning in life. 

Thus, when the #522 arrived, there were a few impressive things. One was a homeless guy with an impressive number of bags, so much so that he appeared to forget that one, in plain sight, was his. He was a traveling caravanserai and in this case, traveling on the bus. Second was that the driver was really eager to get where he was going and the modest capabilities of the bus' suspension be damned, we rattled along at a pace that outdid the cars. Lastly, a Black gentleman got on and told us all that people in Arizona can take a sample of your blood and clone you, that he'd been helped by JEWISH family services, that's JEWISH JEWISH, that something or other food was better than in the slammer, which he didn't like (the slammer, I believe) and that goes for the mental hospital. He was telling us about his love-making prowess as "Big Bear" when he finally got off at the Santa Clara station, to bother people there. Hopefully someone called the nice men with the big net... 

It was a relief to get off at the Diridon bus stop and walk back to Whole Foods and collect my bike and head for home. I got back here at 5 in the afternoon. I set my bed up and was going to read more of "Angry White Pyjamas" but instead, burrowed under the covers and went to sleep until around 11. 


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