Dirt.

I've been shoveling dirt and gravel for the past few days, helping to put together a victory garden in front of San Francisco's City Hall. At one point we all looked up from our shoveling and shimmering there in the heat like some kind of vision was the mayor, in a gorgeous suit and equally gorgeous thin leather shoes.

One of the sweat-begrimed volunteers began telling him that the city should keep on funding the garden, rather than ripping it up and replacing it with sod once Slow Food Nation and Carlo Petrini are safely out of town. "You all might enjoy working on it now," the mayor said in a cautionary tone. "But eventually it'll get weedy and people will start to complain."

"Portland has a full-time victory garden" said the volunteer. "You don't want to be behind Portland, do you?"

And with that, the mayor was gone.

"He didn't even pick up a shovel and pose with it!" one of the volunteers wailed.

People kept on stopping by the garden, and asking when they could come by and plant things. You know, once all the dirt-shoveling was finished. Oddly enough, planting day was already over-subscribed with volunteers, something which had not occurred so far with any of our days of staking, raking, and shoveling. Which reminded me of how my friend Novella complains about how people are always trying to persuade her to let them plant things in her garden. To this she says (I am paraphrasing) "find a vacant lot and start your own garden, chump." Planting = the sexy part.

Civic Center in San Francisco is between the Tenderloin and SOMA, which a fair amount of shitting in public. We discussed this as we shoveled. One person said that Civic Center is only a popular spot for congregating during the day, so stealth shitting in the lettuce by night was unlikely to be an issue. Others demurred. A nearby fountain at UN Plaza had been shut down entirely several years ago because it had acquired Ganges-like qualities. We continued to discuss. Hepatitis? Hep A could be a problem.

I'm glad to live in a city where "Garden in front of City Hall! Cool!" outweighs "We could get sued! For serving hepatitis lettuce from our victory garden!"

The plaza in front of City Hall is normally so stark and boring and International Style in nature. What I wish the city would do is turn it into a bench-lined swath of greenery like Washington Square Park in Philadelphia. Or a Gaudi-in-Barcelona-like plaza made out of San Francisco's smashed crockery.

I realize this is completely out of keeping with any California asthetic traditions, other than the Hearst tradition where you steal anything from Europe that seems nifty and smoosh it all together. Nonetheless, I am endorsing it.

I feel like I read this fairytale once.

NY Times: Albanian Custom Fades, Woman as Family Man.

Her father was killed in a blood feud, and there was no male heir. By custom, Ms. Keqi, now 78, took a vow of lifetime virginity. She lived as a man, the new patriarch, with all the swagger and trappings of male authority — including the obligation to avenge her father’s death.

In all of his books, Randy Shilts manages to write about history in the most sprawling, gossipy, harsh yet idealistic way. Its what I imagine Russian novels would be like, if I actually liked Russian novels. It's so interesting to be reading his last book and to see all the different social movements - civil rights, gay rights, women's rights - converge and both influence and perplex the lives of people in the military.

There's so much in here that I feel like I should have known about years ago. I remember being in high school, and the kids in my history class literally begging our AP History teacher to do a section on Vietnam. We were so earnest, and we totally got shot down. "It's too painful," said Ms Whatever-Her-Name-Was. "I'm not revisiting it." None of us even had the imagination then to ask for the first Gulf War. And none of us even knew there had been a Korean war.

Our history classes always ended with World War II. The Siege at Normandy. That guy kissing that girl in the middle of the ticker tape parade. We were so tired of World War II. Tired of the Nazis. Tired of Winston Churchill. Tired of France. Tired of the bomb, and Oppenheimer, and Stalin and of watching Empire of the Sun over and over again.

Is that how it was for everybody? History beginning with Egyptian Pharoahs, and ending with World War II?

I finished the second draft of a particularly tough article and headed down to the post office to pick up a Mystery Package whose orange slip had been stuck to the hallway door for roughly the last week and a half. It says something about my character to note that a) it was a copy of Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military by Randy Shilts which I b) had forgotten I had even ordered and that c) I was really, really delighted.

On the lobbyist train...

I've gotten fairly practiced over the years in the fine (and, occasionally, not-so-fine) art of Not Driving. I'm nowhere near the level of a woman that I knew in grad school, who just stuck out her thumb and hitchhiked everywhere, but that's the magic of living in Northern California. No matter what particular lifestyle you're enmeshed in, you're always going to run into someone more hardcore about it than you.

So, for me, every new story in a new location is also an experiment in figuring out how to not drive there. In this case, I had to interview a scientist at a bee laboratory in Davis, California. First I dug up a UC Berkeley-UC Davis shuttle, which I figured that I might be able to charm myself onto with my student ID. But the scheduling was all wrong for when I needed to be there. Then I stumbled upon the excellent Davis Wiki, where I found out that Davis is a bicyclist's paradise, and that the Capitol Corridor Amtrak train not only goes right through Davis and has bike facilities, but it also, wonder of wonders, runs on time (This is unheard-of for Amtrak these days. I took a cross-country train back from the Midwest this summer that wound up being about eight hours late.)

The only other guy waiting for the train with me at the Richmond BART stop turned out to be a lawyer. The train itself was the nicest I've ever seen - spotless. Every car had spacious tables (most occupied by guys in suits in ties, studiously typing away at their laptops, surrounded by a nest of leather-bound personal organizers and abstruse paperwork.)

Electrical sockets stretched down both sides of every railcar, ready to be plugged by a thicket of adapters. Gorgeous scenery rolled by on both sides, through the sparkling clean windows. Most amazingly, the food in the snack car was actually pretty good. The whole scenario looked like an advertisement for something. The train pulled up at the Davis train station exactly on time, and I unhooked my bicycle from the train's cunningly designed bike rack and rode on to my appointment.

The reason for all these marvels? Those of you who've been to Washington, DC will remember how the home of the feds has one of the most comprehensive public transit systems in the country. The Capitol Corridor is called that for a reason - it ferries people from Silicon Valley through the Bay Area and ultimately all the way up to Sacramento, California's capitol. It does seem like a bit of an astounding coincidence that the nicest transit does seem to spring up around the tightest aggregations of lawyers and lobbyists. Rather than, say, around the tightest aggregations of people who can't afford cars. Oh, the cynicism.