"a point upon a map of fog..."

Note to my delicate and sensitive readers: 

So there's a part of my San Francisco Adventure Story that involves injury, blood, general nastiness, pain and even partial accidental amputation. I'll save that part for the end, so that those of you prone to the vapors can stop reading. (And also so my extra-nasty readers can skip ahead. You know who you are.)

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My trip to the San Francisco Bay Area was, I believe, an outstanding success. I managed to schedule a surprising amount of productive-type behavior into five days, and I got to see a lot of what is an absolutely beautiful city, even when it's shrouded in rain. Which it was, by the way, beginning the day I arrived and lifting, I suspect, at roughly the same hour that my return flight took off.

The night before I left Texas, the Dallas area was rocked by tornados (tornadi?), so I don't know, maybe it's me.

I'd be the worst sort of jackass guest if I didn't stop right now and express my gratitude to Ian Golder and Monique van den Berg for putting me up (and putting up with me) for the duration of my stay. Five days is a long time to have a house guest, but they never complained and not even once gently suggested that perhaps I'd be more comfortable if I got a room at a hotel or one of the city's many fine homeless shelters. More importantly, their giant dog never tried to eat me, which I also consider the sign of a polite host.

(Actually, the truth is that I have something of a Bigdogaphobia, thanks to a horrible childhood attack by, ironically, the one breed of big dog that doesn't seem to bother me now, a Great Dane. I used to have scars on the back of my legs that told the tale, but I am far too old and fat to be able to look back there now. My thanks to Ian and Monique, and Goulash the Giant But Gentle Dogzilla, for being sensitive to my weird dog issues.)

The first night I was in town, I spoke to Monique's writing class at the College of San Mateo. If you're wondering what possible situation I might consider to be absolutely surreal, it might be speaking to a class that is studying personal narrative by way of my own book. Yes, my book was the assigned text; the students were reading it and taking tests about it and having classroom discussions about it. I could try to spin that experience into some fancy, existential parable, but in all honesty, it was just extremely damn cool to be me that evening. I highly recommend it.

I agreed to help workshop some of the personal narratives written by the students, and to be honest, I was nervous about it. I had no idea what I was going to say if I had to workshop an essay that was, well, bad. But here's the thing: none of them were. Everything I read had a real sense of voice; everything had something to say and a concept of how they wanted to express it. I was legitimately impressed, and only resented their youth a little. Damn kids.

The next day, we visited schools. You knew that already.

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(photo by Monique van den Berg)

I'd never been to San Francisco before, but there are a number of people in the area whom I knew but had never met, in that nerdy internet way that was weird a decade ago but is just now The Way Things Are in the World. My signing at Book Passage in Corte Madera gave me the opportunity to meet some of them in the flesh, as well as see some people I'd met previously and at least one friend from high school. I know I'm going to screw this up and forget someone, but I'd like to thank Shannon, Ian & Monique, Annie, Kate, Alison, Halsted, Kara, Char, and the AMAZING Edith Meyer, who once again showed up with food, this time cookies, shortbread and a lemon loaf that I think I would have knocked down an old person to get to.

Most of all, however, there were two other special guests. Courtesy of Skype and a good sound system set up by Dana, the awesome events person from Book Passage, Julie and Schuyler appeared on my laptop and answered questions and generally charmed the pants off of everyone. So if you weren't there, well, you missed a lot of charmed, pantsless people. Your loss.

(photo by Shannon Kokoska)

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The rest of my visit was vacation, really. We went to the Big Basin Redwoods State Park and saw many a mighty tree, and while I took lots of photos, it's impossible to get a sense of just how gigantic some of them really were. In person, it was "Holy shit, that's a big goddamn redwood!" When you look at the photos, it's more like "Oh, look. A pretty tree."

(photo by Monique van den Berg)

My last day in San Francisco was spent sightseeing in the city with Monique and attending a concert by the San Francisco Symphony, which was Monique's amazing Christmas present to me. The performance was conducted by Charles Dutoit, one of my favorite conductors who, with the Montreal Symphony, produced some of the best and most enduring recordings of the last thirty years. San Francisco Symphony performed Debussy's "Oh, look. A pretty deer.", Stravinsky's Symphony in C, and closed with Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, which is frankly a much better piece that R-K really had any right to compose, based on the rest of his output. Don't get me wrong, Rimsky-Korsakov was a brilliant orchestrator and wrote some fine music, by golly, but in Scheherazade, he really stepped it up. He did us hyphenates proud.

And of course, we visited the Pirate Supply Store at 826 Valencia, which (for zoning purposes) serves as a legitimate business front for the writing center founded by Dave Eggers. I bought pirate flags and a t-shirt and the obligatory eye patch for Schuyler and Julie.

"Pillage before plunder, what a blunder.

Plunder before pillage, mission fulfillage."

I had a great time in San Francisco, and I'd love to return soon. There's a possibility that Schuyler might attend a summer camp for kids who use Big Boxes of Words, although I might have to discover buried treasure or lost mob money to make that a reality.

I hope it happens.

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Okay, I mean it now. Tender-hearts stop reading now. I'm serious. If you don't like the rest of this, don't leave me any crybaby comments. You've been warned.

So yeah, I cut off the end of my finger.

The morning I left for California, I was packing my toiletries and had already put my razor in a side pocket of my little bathroom bag. I decided that it would be a good idea to store my toothbrush in the same pocket (NOTE: This was not actually a good idea), and as I pushed my toothbrush in, it stuck on something, my hand slipped, and my middle finger (aka "The Bird") on my right hand made a rather abrupt and rude introduction to the little Precision Trimmer blade on the top edge of my razor, which if you're into detail, is that funky five-blade "Fusion Power" thing from Gillette.

(Because, you know, it has five blades. How could I use something that just had four, or even three blades -- pshaw! -- all the while KNOWING that there were five blades out there, PLUS that one nasty little trimmer blade on top? Get fucking serious.)

I just went to the Gillette site to see what that little top blade is called, and ran across the following line in the ad: "So comfortable, you barely feel the blades."

I felt the blade.

Now, before you begin to wonder (as you inevitably will) if I immediately went to the emergency room, well, here's the thing. My plane was leaving in about an hour and a half. You just read about the wonderful time I had in San Francisco, and also how many professional commitments I had there. I couldn't just NOT go, all because I cut myself with my razor, and not even shaving but PACKING.

Also, in my own defense (and Julie can queasily back me up on this), it bled. A lot. So much so that I couldn't actually see what I had done. It hurt more than I thought a cut should hurt, and it would not stop bleeding for anything, no matter how much pressure I put on it. But still, I just thought it was a deep cut, right? And when we bandaged it up tightly, the pressure made the bleeding stop. I figured, it just needs some time to settle down. So we threw my bags in the car and drove to the airport, my finger hurting wildly but no longer squirting blood like a Monty Python sketch.

It wasn't until I got past security that I noticed that the bleeding had begun again, seeping through the bandages like, well, like a poorly bandaged wound that really should have been seen by a doctor. If before was a bad time to go have it looked at, then sitting outside my gate with my shoes off wasn't much better. I found a bathroom, decided against removing the bandages (which I still think was probably a smart move on my part, and one that my fellow travelers and bathroom-users would probably agree with) and simply applied MORE bandages on top on the poor little Dutchboy-like original strips that were bravely losing the fight against the flood.

Surprisingly, this second bit of first aid (would that make it second aid?) held, and I made my flight without incident. It wasn't until I attempted to change the bandages before class that I realized how bad it was.

Because it bled again. Badly. And now I saw why.

Okay, so first of all, sit down. Then imagine the very tip of your finger, or my finger really, if that makes you feel better about it. Imagine a piece about the size of a dime (which constitutes most of the tip of your finger, really) and about the thickness of two quarters. Now imagine it connected by a tiny piece of skin. Now imagine it NO LONGER connected by that tiny piece of skin. Imagine it instead stuck to the inside of a bloody bandage, a small not-bloody circle in the middle of a brownish-red tragedy.

And if you're REALLY into detail, also imagine taking your killer razor out of your bag to inexplicably use it against your own stubbly face, despite the fact that it has tasted human blood and may just want more more more. Upon examination, you find that it is surprisingly not at all bloody, because when you cut yourself, your "Ow ow, holy shit, ow motherfucker OW!" reflex kicked in quickly enough to get you to the sink before any real bleeding began. What you do find is what appears to be a small piece of clear plastic stuck in the blades. But when you fish it out, you remember that most clear plastic doesn't have little fingerprint ridges in it. Then you sit down again. And maybe not eat for the rest of the day.

Apparently I cut it twice. One was the big cut, and one was a little bit shaved off the tip, waiting for me to discover it later.

So yeah. I cut off the end of my finger.

Now, I didn't cut off a major, life-changing chunk of my finger. I'll have a flat spot, that's certain, but I can still count to ten and Schuyler can still paint all my fingernails. Still, the cut went deep into that part of the skin where the nerves live, and they do not like being exposed like that. Two weeks after the cut, it is healing up nicely (amazingly, no infection, which goes to show that God really does protect children and stupid people), but you know what?

It still hurts. A lot.

It looks sort of cool, though. I'll leave that to your imagination.