A Laughing Look at Berkeley

            by Joseph Shemuel

 

            As I prepare to leave Berkeley for the pleasant perils of college life, I feel struck with the need to glance back over my years in Berkeley, like a fat Texan reluctantly glances into the toilet bowl after a particularly satisfying release on the porcelain throne. To be frank, I was going to write one long story, but I decided against it after realizing that I’m not funny for more than one page at a time. What follows is a telling narrative of short, loosely connected experiences which I’m pretty sure all somehow relate to my absurd life in Berkeley.

Compost

            I don’t know if you’ve ever had a compost pile (if you’re a Berkeley native, it’s probable), but my family swears by it. First of all, my dad is a total geek, the kind of guy who'd buy a shitty dishwasher just to break it by putting sand in the detergent compartment, take it apart, and put it back together again... hopefully. The disgusting orgy of worms and insects that embeds itself in the festering inferno of our compost pile is enough to make the old man rush to get a kneeling pad, magnifying glass, and specimen jar. "Detritovores," he calls them. I prefer "nasty ass bugs." On the other hand, these six-legged mini-vultures save us tons of money (which, for my dad, is around $5 per month) in food for my gecko, since we no longer have to buy crickets and frozen baby mice for him. This brings me to my next point: the compost is almost as thrifty as it is dorky.

            Who needs to buy expensive potting soil when we can just upend our green plastic bin and recycle months of egg shells, corn husks, and bong resin back into Mother Earth's eager dirt? Yes, he'd rather stink up our front yard and make me carry nature's steaming feces on a shovel every other week than drive down to Home Depot. Because composting is so lucrative, my Dad imposes a strict filter on everything we try to throw away.

            "Is that compostable, Joey?" he asks, pointing at my old sock with a look on his face like he's the Sherlock Holmes of eco-obsession. Captain fucking Planet, minus the blue spandex.

            "I sincerely doubt it," I respond as I open the top of the awaiting trash can.

            "But it's cotton! A plant!" he says. Now he's excited, so he runs to the fridge to check out the yellow "What You Can Compost" flyer that's been plastered to its front for years. "Goddamnit! 'No textiles or fabrics.'"

Cranky Capacitors

            During the early 1980s, while the rest of America was wearing obnoxiously bright colors and making itself retarded with crack cocaine, Jazzercise, and Pat Benatar, my dad emerged from the school bus he'd been living in since 1976 and set out to tour the country with Bob Dylan and Carlos Santana as the lead keyboard roadie. He wasn't on stage most of the time, but he was there - backstage usually, sometimes waiting in the eaves in case Bob or Carlos or whoever was playing second guitar broke a string or overdosed on PCP and needed a mid-song replacement.

            Being a keyboard roadie in the early 1980s was very different from how it is today, not that you have any clue about that, either; you couldn't just press the On/Off button and be done with it. Synthesizers of the 80s were temperamental, complicated, whiny bastards that required constant tuning. And unlike a guitar where you just close your eyes and tighten or loosen the string until it "feels like G," to tune an old analog synth, you had to get down and dirty with an entire toolbox to twiddle around with potentiometers, transistors, and other esoteric-sounding gizmos that would give anyone with an electrician's certification wood. You soldered, twisted, and tinkered, and just as you thought you had achieved some semblance of pitch, your low frequency oscillator would go out of phase with the binary control (no one really knows what this means), and you realized you never had a clue.

Frick You! (WARNING: If profanity offends you, it should.)

The word “fuck” gets a bad rap these days. Here’s how it goes: If I stub my toe in class and shout “fuck,” everyone who happens to be listening to me instead of to the teacher - a flatteringly large number of students - hears the word “fuck,” takes a second to mentally process it as “fuck” indeed, and then determines that I’ve either had it with public education or been mauled by some sort of zoo animal, until I hobble past, clutching my foot. The offended teacher will be quick to issue me a one-way pass to on-campus suspension, or at worst, a really dirty look. On the other hand, if I shout a “polite” alternative, such as “fook,” “farg,” or “flip,” everyone hears “fook/farg/flip,” mentally processes it as “fuck” anyway because “fook/farg/flip” are so phonetically similar to “fuck” (unless he or she has lived with a pack of three-toed sloths in Bolivia since birth), and then proceeds to deduce the aforementioned mauling, toe-stubbage, etc. But in this case, I’ll probably get a pass to the health center for a band-aid and ibuprofen. But what’s the flipping difference? In either situation, everyone has “fuck” firmly imprinted on his or her frontal lobes until Mr. Cagan gleefully washes it away with the capitols of post-colonial African nations.

It would be different if “fook,” “farg,” and “flip,” were all ways of expressing the sentiment of “fuck” with less intensity and anger, but then we’d expect to see them used uniformly as such; people would say “flip” regardless of whether they were in front of their friends or the principal. But it’s simply not true. People say “flip” in front of Mr. Slemp, but “fuck” in front of the homies. They have the same meaning, similar spelling and pronunciation, but completely different levels of offensiveness.

How can we explain this? Either we’re all a bunch of pussies that are so instinctively attached to euphemisms we fail to think about them; or we genuinely have a vendetta against the word “fuck” while accepting its close substitutes. Either way, “fuck” loses out. Fuck that.

Shitty Planning

As much as I love Berkeley, I’m a horrible Berkeleyan - I have no idea who designed the city, who currently runs it, or who came up with the brilliant idea to spend $40,000 on a fountain of dancing bears at the Marin Circle. Fortunately, none of that concerns me, at least for the moment. What does interest me is city planning; which AC Transit employee designed the public bus routes and schedules? Take the 52L bus, for example. It runs from west Berkeley’s public housing strips to UC campus, which is a good idea, especially considering how much the fucking tuition at Cal costs these days. But the 52L comes once an hour, from 8AM to Noon, and then again from 4PM to 8PM. If you happen to have an afternoon class whose schedule doesn’t accommodate AC Transit’s gratuitous four-hour siesta, you’re doomed to take the 72R along San Pablo Ave, transfer to the 43 at the bottom of Solano Ave, and then take the 51 or 40L from downtown Berkeley up to campus. The trip will take at least an hour and a half. In that time, you could’ve pogo-sticked up to campus while wearing a blindfold, which would have been far more exciting anyway.

But the most egregious example of expertly-planned public bussing may be the 67, which delivers baggy-eyed students and geriatric seniors from the hills of North Berkeley to Berkeley High campus and the utter thrill that is downtown Berkeley. (It’s so bland that one popular restaurant had to call itself “Downtown” in order to remind patrons they weren’t in a ghost town.) Like most public busses in Berkeley, the 67 is sporadic, both in scheduling and route. Unlike most bus lines, however, when the 67 takes a different route Sunday morning than it does on Thursay afternoon, it’s intentional. The 67 is, by all confirmable witness accounts, a shape-shifter. The weekday route is fairly average for a bus; it runs from downtown Berkeley into the hills, does a little loop, and then barrels back down Spruce St from whence it came. But on weekends, the 67’s route becomes officially known as “Senior Loop.” (This is not wordplay. The LED sign on the front actually says “Senior Loop.”) The Senior Loop is a tad more ambitious. Instead of merely looping around Spruce and Grizzly Peak like a graceful Sunday drive, the Senior Loop unapologetically dips into Tilden Park, where Berkeley’s stockpile of senior citizens purportedly hides out. I have ridden my bike through Tilden Park hundreds of times, and while I may see fellow bikers, runners, and the occasional unicyclist, I have never, ever seen a senior citizen. What’s more, with a constantly changing route, the 67 is bound to confuse more seniors than it carries; Old Mr. Jenkins who can barely find his reading glasses (+3.50, if you were wondering), will be hard pressed to remember where the hell the bus stop is if it’s the third Friday in March at 3:00 PM with a slight chance of rain.