14 days of autumn

A trip to just see how we’re all doing. In short, I think we’re going to make it.

On delays

We want to believe that after delaying and putting off and being told to wait your turn, that you'll look back and realize that not only was it worth it, but that you're better off because of the wait. Certain things, the good things, don't come easily they say. Buying a house, passing the tests, finishing that project, are all necessary goals and deserve our attention, so you should go ahead and shut down for a year (and the rest of your life while you're at it), make your sacrifices, and get comfortable because that's what they do. That's life, they say, so you realize that all the other stuff was just training and eager anticipation for your first mortgage payment. Okay. Fair enough. But what happens next?

I'll let you know how it goes.

movies about architects

Sweating in a windowless office wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. My would-be mortgage broker sifted through a stack of new listings and old pamphlets, building up the ease of home purchase while muttering something about the the “gay Ansel Adams posters” in his newly acquired office. What I had dressed up for, what I had saved up years for, quickly filtered through a handful of standard salary and marital status questions that gauged my risk as a human being. Down the hallway, the Friday afternoon cleaning lady started vacuuming, and lines of empty cubicles sat in front of the western facing window wall, looking out at a packed freeway intersection, blasted by an early evening sun. I was low risk, he said. Actually it was more along the lines of “Dude, your credit score is bad ass.” The air system cranked back on, making me realize that it’d been off this whole time, off most of the time since the glass building had closed for the weekend.
Five minutes later it had turned back off, and we’d pulled up a hundred or so listings that matched my parameters that fit within the parameters that he’d offered me. Whatever I choose to pursue,  “I’ll be a bitch, but I’ll be your bitch,” which sounded exciting as I’d never had my own real estate bitch. Someone alongside who wouldn’t pull punches. Lender and realtor all in one.

My god, what have I done?

back to the laundromat

After recently learning that washing your pillows could be a good thing, but soon after realizing that my closet washer/dryer didn’t agree, I pulled out the old laundry bag and went walking. It had been nearly two and a half years in my current apartment and two and a half years since I’d been to the laundromat to hear the Vegasish clang of twenty quarters in unison. Where I last left it, disintegrated foam mattresses were strewn about yellow terrazzo floors and middle age men parked idled outside, whistling when I dropped a sock. Not the best of memories, but that night wasn’t the best of laundromats. In the better ones, I found the best of nights.
Now in the next neighborhood over, and trying to dedicate myself to pedestrian environments, I walked the walk 4 or so blocks to a brightly lit operation in the dark headwaters of Blanco road. I’d always found this whole corner of Beacon Hill interesting, stuck between the tracks, industry, and a steep incline that constitutes the Hill. The laundromat is about as clean as they come though, seen through the spotless storefront windows. Protected from the crowds of Fredericksburg Road and the sins of McCullough, a skinny abuelita manages the business with tropical colored pants and a endless bottle of Windex.
I sat down, stuffed in my pillows to a giant front loader, and watched her glide back and forth polishing the dryer glass and wood panel walls over and over. Over the sound of her and her machines, the sound of a wall mounted tv tuned to Seinfeld reruns, and over that the sounds of an old Street Fighter II console playing its once familiar automated loop. Kids played hide and seek.
Over that, I read. I’ll hold myself back from a gushing review of a Pattern Language, mainly because I’m always a fan of my latest book, so I’ll just say it’s getting at what I’ve been going after. Somewhere within these cities, buildings, window seats, and country sides I’ve been collecting, there is a reason. Beauty and function stemming from a set of patterns, that luckily then combine into an infinite array of new patterns, lending themselves all to the complexities and contradictions that make a truly great anything. Or one hopes. I can assume that by the shear number of rules that they prescribe (253) that there are countless more rules to argue for. Whether in full agreement or not, my brain is finally thinking and not studying.
The trick is to focus all this with my energy and make something of it. And at such an opportune time, as I take on all the projects I’ve been preparing for, right as she turns off the lights, and my dryer buzzer goes off.

mileage

Possibly in an attempt to prolong the last few weeks of test taking, I’ve taken on the long lost hobby of car shopping. Here near the peak of a carless lifestyle, as the auto industries dismantle around us, I’m hooked into craigslist feeds and spend evenings organizing note cards and post it notes scrawled with nonsensical 4wd114k013995s and bluenewtire shorthand. It’s all in preparing the tools I need to get things done. My energy is pent up, spent sparingly on side tasks, a few new plants for the garden, one…more…bike tube, enough to keep me going for the next test, and the next, but soon enough the dam will break, and I’ll be slamming into it the flood with all the 4wdbluenewtires I can get my hands on for $5000. Or maybe more like an ark with fold down seats, gathering discarded construction debris and homeless dogs as I roam the city.

And here’s where I meet the man who I might become, trying to sell me the XJ that’ll get me there. Him, a retired military psychologist with a verdant south side river mission composed of an old stone house, a 10,000 square foot car garage designed to seal up in the event of a flood, and spare train car, 18 wheeler, and decommissioned fighter jet just hanging out on his river fed green grass lawn with the dog. Me, a young impressionable one-day-retired architect just soaking it in as the late evening sun feathers out behind layers of thirty foot tall bamboo growth, dusking to the point where his obviously red dyed grey beard starts to look naturally red, and then grey again. There was a driveway full of vehicles to choose from, each with its own story, but each connected by this one man who would collect them, clean them up, and release them back into the outside city better off and ready for 114k+ miles more of work. Talk of fuel mileage turns into stories of the one jeep caught in a tornado, to the pecan trees that try to bash in his house roof. Some drunk guys wandered into his hideaway, passing out in the caboose. Inside, I saw the extent of his projects, spiral stairs and rolls of film, all mostly finished, but probably on twenty year time lines. Half the house is a shell of nice historic looking cottage/bureaucracy loophole, merely roughed in with plywood inside, yet housing finely carved jukeboxes and pipe organs that are not yet ready to return to the world outside.

Three hours into to my fifteen minute test drive, neither was I, but we both had to get back to our projects.

Close Enough

I believe this food processor will be the end of me. 15 pieces or so of cucumber cutting action and somehow I’m not convinced that it’s a step up in productivity. Honestly I spent a half hour cleaning a plastic hexagon shaped rod and I’m still not sure what it’s for…or how it got dirty in the first place. Don’t get me wrong, I chopped an onion 15 times as fast, but hanging your eyeballs over the results is going to make you tear up either way.

With each step towards simplicity, there’s another fleeting grasp towards complication. Maybe I just need a special hexagon rod brush. It’s easy to get caught up in the details.

Looking back and catching up

To anyone still around or with a lonely RSS feed, welcome.

$4.00

As waves come crashing inland, cars gridlock amidst a miles long din, and people plead for someone to do something, we're peddling through with a sack full of tomatoes and a wonder for what all the commotion is about.

the nights it got real hot

continuum

I've hit that stride. Back in school, any chance to slow down is a chance to prepare for the next semester or catch up on your sleep. Happily, my winter break just keeps plowing through the humidity and I find myself well rested with my belly full. Sure there're rumblings of the next MS150, the next garden harvest, and the next work project that will lay claim to my year, but I figure it's best not to rehash just because it worked before. That's the next semester method. The key, or as I've figured out in the blog run, is to go opposite of the default.

So this eve of the anniversary of the latest big push has me wondering where all the time has gone. I think it went a lot of places and I'm just starting to see the fruits and vegetables of my labors. In the very least, I've got the mantle full of yellow quash seedlings, tired of their daily waterings, just aching to get their roots dirty. Hold on little guys. This is just the beginning of the end of the beginning.

You didn't think we were done, did you?

both sides of the bike

i posted 50 or so bike flyers and he took most down following right behind me. why sir? well i was a punk, or some sibilance of one, is what he pieced together. a grade above graffiti artist, yet dressed in relaxed fit blue jeans and a button down shirt. he, a local merchant, accused me of uglifying his street and ultimately bringing down the neighborhood. me, the guy who had attended more neighborhood planning and association meetings than anyone else in the city, this side of the private sector. no sir, i thought to myself, we're actually on the same side so stick with me. i've spent nearly the last 12 months designing and constructing a major historic chunk of your streets, complete with fancy new light posts, on the hope that a few more punk kids will come next year and cover the brushed aluminum finish with a flyer or two. just imagine it sir. at some point you won't be able to manage it all and the streets shall runneth over with people doing all of the things we didn't plan for them to do. you won't know what to do...I actually failed to say most of this and stood somewhat receptive to his own speech. he went on how the new bikers in the area were hurting business, with which i managed to inform him of the following week's transportation planning meeting. take that! in the end we were both a little thrown off though that we'd both taken the offensive arguing for the same thing. by the way, after hundreds more flyers did make their way around the city and almost all our energy expended to get it there, the second bike summit was a success.

meanwhile i'd been training and raising money for my MS bike ride to across the coastal plains. six months ago i embarked on that with the purchase of an actual road bike, and the following pedal clips and florescent paraphernalia that would go with it. i knew it'd be hard both physically and physiologically to, you know, be a cyclist instead of just a guy who bikes. i in fact had been taking it a bit too casually throughout the summer in exchange for other agendas, but the early days of fall were spent with my crotch hugging the frame coasting and climbing the hills of bexar county. and then on the big weekend, i found that yes i am comfortable in my skin tight uniform chugging pickle juice and applying butter to my shammy. 150 miles into it, as my team and i turned a corner to see a bay bridge below and the comforting corpus christi skyline backdropped by the gulf of mexico i realized that i'd be back next year and maybe at a faster pace.

but for now i'm back to just the guy who bikes.

so ironic, it isn't and so un-ironic, it is

So Austin is weird. I get it. I like it, yes, but it's no longer mine. I go there, visit, eat my share of urban delicacies and I'm reminded with each neo-dive establishment that I'm not as cool as you. Even as I spend a three day weekend at a huge festival and blend in among them, I'm the explorer stumbling across the beautiful person microcosm. It's more foreign with each new high rise condo that appears and with every familiar face that leaves. I feel more like a stranger each time I come home.

So SA is lame. I understand. We passively watch pro wrestlers in for a glimmer of pasión and have generally relegated any smattering of comunidad to the chunk of year between Fiesta and NBA championships. For years, I know, the urban renaissance has been underway, but this rate of rebirth has pushed our pregnancy into a fifth trimester. As I've found myself well into el gremio, it's time to create that which we've always wanted. With each high rise hotel taking over downtown, I find another action/cultural/planning event and recruit troupes for the eventual Battle of the Alamo Gifts Shops. Community gardens, neighborhood planning meetings, bicycle coops, and the whole grab bag of cliche liberal ammunition that it takes to push back against our own momentum. It's underground, by certain measures, but the people in power are dropping phrases like farmers market in increasingly regular city meetings. This week I watched my old SA neighborhood passionately presenting for historic designation and everyone in the press room felt something we hadn't felt in a while. I think this is going to happen, my friends, but we must look to our neighbors a la norte and figure out what we're willing to do to get there.  Let's not forget where we came from.

portlandia

northwest is a buzzword that strongly hits the hippest of nerves. the birthplace of coffee, hacky sacks, and platonian philosophizing, they’ve had us believe. hell i think they invented the pine tree, right? it’s with such questions heavy in my heart that i bought a plane ticket just two days prior to my excursion. i’d be like a modern louis and clark cultural expedition, except i’d transfer planes in denver.

the greatest thing about last minute airfare is it forces you to spend the rest of your trip frugally. i’m talking about foraging for berries, frugal, which was the case not long into a long beautiful hike. i’m talking about walking the streets and seeing where they took me, and who would take me in. i was lucky to have three semi-random hosts willing to free up some floor space and a wealth of comfortable park benches during the day.

rachel was generous enough to pick vicki, mark, and i up from the airport, drop me off to explore, and save me from cold and starvation the first night when i hadn’t set up a home yet. my first full day in portland was spent with rachel and vicki mostly outside of portland, driving across the beautiful countryside in search of hot springs. a locked gate and closed sign only encouraged the determined women to delve deeper into a village of naked men. upon their discovery, the gay men’s retreat politely asked us to leave and call ahead next time. gladly they didn’t ask us to leave the boy. the path home afforded the rare american work of alvar aalto and a chance at sneaking into a countryside wedding.

farhad drives an orange 1978 mercedes van complete with built in kitchen/bathroom and friendly pitbull/ridgeback. living behind an old house in the newest gentrified neighborhood of the NE, he had turned a garage into an apartment, the diesel van into biodiesel, and my preconceptions about portland on its end. it’s deeper than cool graphic tees and fixed gear bikes. it’s about, if i may, people doing it yourself. sure, that leads to a sampling of clichéd urban burritos stands, but it’s all individuals deciding they want something and in turn making it. these are not your father’s lazy hippies, but the most entrepreneurial of the gen-y. there’s a certain energy in the air i felt biking through hordes of artisan market shoppers. farhad himself, was making a living my buying and selling cars month by month, and retrofitting the rest of the diesels in portland to biofuel for an ambitious fee. thusly, he has a web of former and future clients spread around the various neighborhoods all involved in their own like minded projects. that said, i’m still not convinced the entire city can keep up. for every well meaning light bulb shop, there’s yet another hip baroque children’s boutique, and yet one less black family. one more pizza place, street car stop, and displaced family. the crime has moved away, so that the white people can safely talk about darfur. somewhere between, around true genuine intention and positive outcome, i found the rebuilding center. it provided the pot belly stove to farhad and thousands of other reclaimed pieces of portland’s past. if they are going to change, grow, move at this rate, the people at least know where they’re coming from.

After spending a Saturday night with a hundred interrelated Persians in the suburbs and wishing farhad good luck with his newly purchased boat, I was back to nomading Sunday claiming park bench space for my busted backpack and weary legs. a scrap of paper and half charged cell phone held whatever chances i had for shelter. couchsurfer sarah, like an angel, pulled me into her already overbooked home by downtown. I’d be staying with three other random travelers that night so i dumped what i could and left her to what ever quiet time she had. she left me with a new scrap of paper detailing the hiking trail that would lead to the aforementioned berries and beauty. hours later and still shy of my planned return i wandered out of the woods into yet another great neighborhood and its local movie theater. for two hours, i was there, living in portland, not visiting, not urban exploring. i just sat and laughed. meanwhile sarah worried for my return and left me vibrating voicemails telling me it was safe to come home. and there was home, warmly lit with three and a half total strangers who i’d all be sharing stories with into the night. rose, dan, shir, and marc all staying with sarah on NW 18^th, fourth floor, examining the fantastic social project we’d undertaken. by the next day, i’d have critiqued rose’s vintage clothes shopping, listened to shir’s israeli military experience, and been woken up by the news of dan’s late night bike accident. we again left each to their own adventure and i headed out for one more full day of getting my fill of portland. by bike, trolly, and tramway i covered the largest areas yet and collapsed in the architectural section of the book store that had by then become my most steady address. i called sarah, she mostly asleep from the emergency room night before, didn’t really remember who i was, but simply asked “do you want to come home?”

tired, and better off because of it, i was ready to go home.

when it rained, it poured

for months straight it rained and kept us inside as best it could. it deterred the dryest of plans, possibly took away my internet, and got my socks wet. within the cumulonimbus cage, we pressed on and gave it all we had until it gave up. it's done and thus with this little patch of 110 degree sun i'm making a break for it. let's head west, he said, and with that i bought a last minute ticket and packed a bag.

Summer

the girl in her summer dresses

it’s funny how sprawling by your closest window unit can bring up memories of san antonio summers past, each one surprisingly different in this city that never changes. then again differences are easily measured against the likenesses. the day again belongs to a development company in florida, dealing out scissor trusses by the handful. somewhere in there though i’m preparing to run meetings at city hall. the nights spent studying have simply switched from texas judicial procedures to certified wood ratings, yet are thankfully distracted by someone strumming songs on the couch. and the spurs, god bless them, win again giving way to downtown pandemonium of which this time i contribute. it’s a little less observation and a little more action.

riding around in strangers’ pickup beds through an ad hoc humid parade of late night gridlock kind of makes you feel like you’ve arrived…we’ve arrived…with decorative brooms in hand. it’s everything we’ve been working for. lying around by that humming AC let’s you wonder what’s next.

either way, let’s ignore the electric bill until october.

Architects!

22,000 architects, months of preparation, a former Vice President, and a contingency of dedicated locals showed that maybe, just maybe there's hope for architecture and San Antonio over the next few years. For now, the convention is over so let's all take a breather before we get too busy.

Happy May

The last throws of April showers afforded a four day eye in the storm in which us San Antonians poured out of our respective barrios to finish out Fiesta just as strong as it started. Front porch gentility meets back yard wrestling in our holiest of secular celebrations. Sushi and beer alongside strippers and renaissance art on a Thursday night give way to roof top hammock naps overlooking the city skyline. Hanging off neo-classical confetti covered cornices proved the perfect perch for pitching pastel eggs at parading sneaker clad debutantes. The same Friday followed by comped chicken,waffles, and bike rides to meat packing plants and haunted VFW halls proved to be the best paid vacation day ever. Saturday set a new standard for sedintariness as the three block stroll between a keg laden porch and a historic neighborhood fair became my only challenge. Foot long corn dogs on the other end were a worthy carrot on a stick. That mustard stained shirt should never be washed.


Then in the final hours of Sunday sunlight, the rain returned to soak every kickballer on our makeshift field. We played through the downpour to an 11 or 12th inning until the roasted corn stopped roasting. There, covered in butter, mud, and more confetti I saw that fiesta was over. Someone likened Sunday to the last day of summer where the sun sets and the credits roll under voice overs letting us know where the motley group of sandlotters would end up for the rest of their separate lives. Luckily summer hasn't yet started.