Spacy Today
Late Saturday afternoon, having returned home from shooting MSP's parents 50th wedding anniversary party on a rented catamaran out on San Francisco Bay. I am one tired photographer. Two weeks lying flat on my back coughing at the ceiling and now walking miles with a camera collection draped over my shoulder (Pier 40 is right at the BART station, right? Get off the train, get on the boat, have a Bloody Mary. What can go wrong? Well, Pier 2 is right at the BART station and if you hang a right and walk far enough south, well, Pier 40 will appear on the horizon. Oh, says I.) Not so bad. I've walked this stretch before. Pier 40, it turns out, sits next to the Giant's Baseball Stadium, the wondrous Pac Bell Park that opened last year to great hoo-haw and has every San Franciscan twittering on to distraction. (That's sour grapes, by the way: We don't do no twitter here in Oakland.)
Mostly I stayed below deck and shot pictures from a table beside the buffet. Twenty, thirty people on a 60 odd foot sailing catamaran, which turns out to be a very good size for twenty or thirty people. One camera shooting Ektachrome 100s color slide and another with TMAX-400 black and white. Since I was doing it for cost of materials, I figured they wouldn't mind if I slipped in some black and white. I'll work out the color prints from the slides Monday when I take them in for processing. I want slides. I want to put them through the scanner and not have to attempt any PhotoShop miracles. (Insert print film versus slide film diatribe.)
Nice to be out on a boat. A yacht. A whatever. When I was young and lived in Seattle my parents
owned boats. Nothing like a 60 foot twin hulled catamaran thingie like this one, but real boats, none the less, and there was a time when I thought I knew something about them. Other family members still in Seattle own boats, some of them large and comfortable. It's just not a scene I know anymore and I think I've lost all my knowledgeable noises: Technical stuff like starboard and larboard and yarboard. But I guess I do have to say something: San Francisco Bay is a nice sail and it was fun to see the city up close from out on the water. We sailed around Angel Island (the west coast equivalent to Ellis Island). We passed other larger and smaller boats roaring and tacking in circles just like we were. (Insert snotty comments about vastly superior Seattle waters where the real boating takes place.) And everybody had a good time, the two little kids acting out like little kids, the older little kids who weren't nearly as cute anymore playing with the little kids who still were (cute) and everybody else eating and drinking and making things comfortable for the photographer, who shot all his pictures seated at a table, a real boating expert, formerly from Seattle.
So here it is, late on a Saturday, and I think my cold is finally nailed. I just spent an hour in bed watching television without coughing. Tonight should be my second night of decent sleep. Tomorrow could be anything. (Come to think of it, it's Easter. Are you supposed to send your mother something - a card, flowers - on Easter? I think I used to do that. Better call. Wish her a happy Easter. Mention I'm driving up next week.) A little spacy today, here in Oakland.
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