Thank you, I more or less say to my nephew as we pull away from the house, thank you for driving with me. In retrospect, this seems a little feeble. But I feel a little feeble. And the next thing I say is not so much feeble as frank. I talk about age and anxiety, how they seem to go together. And more to the point, how the quality of being aged seems directly proportional to the quality of being…well, there's no single adjective here. It's the quality of giving in to fear. This is what can kill Read more [...]

In my San Francisco neighborhood Google buses don’t look very much like symbols of gentrification. They look suspiciously like buses. This is the way to understand them, as vehicles that say a lot about us and our future. Some of the ire against corporate buses is not misplaced. Bay Area residents can only gape as techy arrivistes step aboard comfortable transit that appears often…and takes them where they want to go. Imagine. And "imagine" is what we need to do. How can our Bay Area modernize Read more [...]

Somewhere between reality and madness there is driving. I applaud loyal readers for putting up with this tiresome subject. But here it is again. It must be noted that one of the many complicating factors in my life behind the wheel is the growing superfluity of getting behind the wheel. Just in the last few days…our Friday night out was facilitated greatly by BART, the regional metro. And a daylong class near the University of California, damned if we didn’t get to Berkeley the same way. So Read more [...]