But then again... too few to mention

I have this affinity for the Roaring 20s (and to a lesser extent, the Depression-era 30s). The books of course, but also the idea of the parties (I'm sure it would have sucked if you didn't know Gatsby) the cars on dirt roads, the hustle-and-bustle of New York, the short haircuts on the ladies, the hats, the thrill of drinking illegal martinis, the flapper dresses, and mostly the men's suits.


I can't lie, I like wearing suits and I don't think I'm being arrogant when I say I look good in them. Everyone does, that's why men have been wearing suits for hundreds of years with only slight variations. Two buttons, three buttons, with a vest, with a bow tie, with a bright-colored T-shirt a-la Miami Vice - the alterations for seasons and eras are really only minor details.

What makes the 20s and 30s fashion distinct in my mind is that men wore suits all the time. Traditionally, if a party's dress code was "casual," it meant men would show up in a three-piece suit. If a man were going to a park for a picnic on a Sunday afternoon, he'd wear a suit. And he looked good doing it.

After watching "The Darjeeling Limited" yesterday I was struck by how casual the three stars looked as they trekked across India even though they were all wearing suits (the movie is also great for non sartorial reasons).

Aside from Barney Stinson urging people to "Suit Up," Mike has also been encouraging a heightened dress code lately. The man owns well over 50 ties and he looks good in all of them. So this morning I was thinking I would like to wear suits on occasions that don't call for them in the modern sense (weddings, funerals, church functions etc.). But the thing is I need to wear suits that look nice, but don't cost as much as my usual suits so I won't get sad and poor if some moron spills wine on me (cough... Parsa... cough).

Not four hours later, without looking, I found a linen suit, the kind I would feel great about wearing out to Jay's on West Egg some fictional Saturday night 80 years ago. The one problem was they didn't have pants for me, just the jacket. I now regret not buying the jacket and hunting down the pants later. I need a nice summer jacket anyway, as I outgrew the one I used to love. Not so much in size but in age bracket.

The pants eluded me today, but that’s no matter — to-morrow I will search harder, stretch out my arms farther... And one fine morning ——
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Join the clubs

Sometimes I feel that I fail to grasp the significance of events in my own life.

I started golfing when I was 9. I was just going to walk around with my dad and uncle, but when my dad found out he had to pay the same amount if I walked or played, he jammed a club in my hand and after my first round hunted down some used my-sized clubs from the classified ads (the early 90s version of Craigslist).

I can legitimately say that I've been playing golf for most of my life, which means I should be a lot better than I am by now, and I don't mean this as an excuse, but I've never really had my own set of clubs.

For much of my four-year varsity high school career, I used my mom's old clubs (she never really took to the game and these also got their start in our family used from the classifieds). I was a short kid (and know I'm not really a tall man) so it made sense that I use a set of women's clubs. Or so my dad said. I didn't have a problem with it, except that my woods said "Lady Laser" on them and the high school boys I played with and against got a pretty big kick out of it (the richer schools were the worst. Several times our teams, mine being the Hayward area golf equivalent of "The Bad News Bears," almost came to blows over issues other than my clubs, but in my head it was mostly that).

I don't know, 10 years later, if the whole experience of swinging the Lady Lasers made me more resilient with a thicker skin or made me into a chubby ball of self-loathing. It didn't help that, often times, especially compared to the really good players, I hit the ball "like a girl."

I only recently told my family about what I now see as the humor of my using those clubs for competitive play. Mercifully, before the spring season of my senior year, I grew to average size (finally becoming taller than my then-idol, Muggsy Bogues) and inherited my dad's old clubs which, like Tom Hanks' only friend in "Castway," had Wilson written on them. These have been my clubs ever since my dad bought himself those new ones.

Some of my friends from the team asked me what happened to the lasers. My sister played with them today, if any of you are wondering.

After 15 years of swinging hand-me-down or ladies clubs, for my recent birthday I got a set of golf clubs. Well, in theory. My parents didn't know what kind I would want, so in an incredibly out-of-character move, they gave me cash and told me what I was allowed to buy with it (we never give cash in this family).

Two months later I still haven't gone to look for a set of clubs. Faced with the question of what I want, I'm quite stumped. It's never really occurred to me to think about it. Graphite or steel? Stiff or flexible? What kind of grip do I like? How should I know? The last time I swung a brand new club, it was somebody else's and they were just showing it to me. They liked it, and it seemed like it would hit a golf ball well enough, but really, how am I supposed to know the difference? I know what I don't like, but I'm almost certain that has a lot more to do with my skill level than my second-generation clubs.

My search isn't aided at all by the fact that I don't really like shopping. Looking for clubs seems a lot like trying things on and I get tired of that kind of thing real quick. I'm thinking about just buying my uncle's old ones from him. If only to keep my streak alive.

This whole thing might be a metaphor for my life. Or it might just mean that my sister is wrong and I'm not the favorite. It could even be both, but it's probably neither.

A Lucky Break

Saturday: 6:30 a.m. Dad and I are awake and loading the boat up to go fishing. It's to be my first time out on the Bay in about four years. We hitch it up to the truck and pull it out from alongside the house. Most visitors don't even notice the 18-foot Marlin sticking up behind the gate at what appears to be the end of the driveway. But from behind where my mom's car parks, after swinging the gate back, you can't help but see the big blue boat on the rusty trailer.

The sun's up but we can only assume that because the sky's cloudy, so it will be a good day to be on the water trying to catch halibut (pictured below).
I'm closing the gate as I hear Dad, from the end of the driveway say "Yup. Don't close it. We're done." My dad has a dramatic and absolute way of speaking sometimes. As if you've been in the middle of a conversation, he'll answer a question or make a statement that makes absolute sense in the context of that conversation. The one you weren't having.

Here, the conversation we weren't having was something like, "I heard a bit of a ca-chunk back there. What was that? Did the rusty trailer hitch on this 20-year-old boat just break finally?"

I walk over and we look at the damage. Right behind where the tow-ball comes out of the truck, the trailer hinged down to the ground. Not severed, but most definitely broken. I pick up the tongue as Dad C-clamps the tubing back together. We then help the boat retrace its steps cautiously back up the curb, into the driveway, and back along the side of the house.

The day has become about something else now. For years we've driven down the freeway or over railroad tracks, towing the boat in fear that the inevitable would happen. The trailer would crumble in a flurry of rusty flakes of metal, followed by a shower of sparks as it dragged on the asphalt, followed by hopefully not too much collateral damage. Saturday morning we only had the first step of the inevitable and had a perfect opportunity to prevent the latter two from ever happening.

8 a.m. we're heading to the scrap yard (always a weird kind of treat). We bought 45 inches of 3x3-inch square tubing. Dad wanted to replace the 1/16-inch metal with 1/4-inch, but since they didn't have that I convinced him that twice as strong (1/8-inch) would surely outlast a) the rest of the trailer, and b) sadly, the boat. Next was a trip to PepBoys for a trailer hitch, then a trip to Carrow's next door for strawberry pancakes, then back home to wait for about 10 a.m. when we could start making noise without feeling like douchey neighbors.

The next step, ironically, involved quite a few sparks. We grinded (or ground, if you prefer), sawed and hammered the old metal out of there. Then we welded, bolted and painted the new material in so it all looked surprisingly high-quality and original.

Sunday: 7 a.m. The boat was mostly already loaded from yesterday, so we just filled up the cooler with some food and sodas, tossed it in and pulled the boat out again. This time there was no scraping thud at the end of the driveway. We took the boat all the way to the marina and saw all the flags in the area taut in the incredibly strong winds. We hesitated for about half an hour before finally saying, who cares, this is three days of 6:30 alarm clocks in the making (Friday's story of us not going is decidedly less interesting), let's just get the thing wet already.

We caught no fish (pictured below, not me nor Dad, but some guy from Google images),

but Dad got a leopard shark nearly 3 feet long and a scary-looking seven-gill shark that was about 4.5 feet long (1.5 meters) with a mouth the size of a honeydew.

The wind stayed rough and we took a beating on the way back in, riding up and down waves like George Clooney at the end of "A Perfect Storm." The only thing close to a fish that I caught was in my glass of Coke Zero after I got home and took a shower. Right in the middle of the ice cubes, I could swear I saw a sardine head bobbing mockingly in the middle of my zero calorie refreshment. I knew I should have only put my usual three ice cubes in the glass.

Bounce House Redux

So I spent the last week (every day all day last week) delivering flowers for Mother's Day. Saturday was not only my sister's birthday, but it was apparently the birthday of dozens of kids around Hayward as well, judging by all the bounce houses I saw in people's front yards and driveways.

It was a gorgeous day for bouncing, and at about 3 in the afternoon I pull up to a house, number 169, and start walking to the door. Aside from the strangeness of a little boy about 6 years old answering the door and not having a) any parents home or b) any idea if Mariana lived there, the house was remarkable because of what was next door.

In the driveway adjacent to 169 was a truck with planks of wood making the bed deeper. Painted on the wood was a phone number and a logo. It was a bounce house delivery truck. Like Neo, I saw the source.

And I'll tell you my most common thought over the last week, which went unsaid because I'm polite. "I don't know. There's a card here, maybe you should just read that. If I had to guess, I'd say they were from one of your kids since it's you know, Mother's Day."

"Zac, wome [sic] that cut our flesh S. Plascencia"

After reading the famous novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez I decided to go back and reread what I often refer to as my favorite book, "The People of Paper" by Salvador Plascencia.

It's hard to describe what it's about since, like all post-modern art, it's really about itself, but the story deals with love, war, sadness and oppression - all of which is about the book in some way if you really wanted to think about it hard.

I first read the book as part of my contemporary American literature class, which ended up being probably the best class I ever took in my academic career. The professor, Katherine Hayles, who also served as my TA during section, is often referred to as one of the foremost literary critics of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. She has so much clout actually, that she was able to get Sal Plascencia to come to our class and discuss the first, and to date only, novel he's written.

Sal was a doctoral student at USC at the time (and likely still is) and was noticeably nervous speaking about his book not so much to the class, but with Dr Hayles (interesting trivia about her: she has a masters and PhD in English but also a masters in chemistry from Cal Tech).

So we asked Sal questions (the binary sections are just gibberish but there is something written under Baby Nostradamus' black circles) and he signed our books if we wanted. At the time I wished I hadn't cheeped out at the beginning of the semester and bought a used version but now I'm glad there's a little bit of wear and a UCLA stamp on the spine.

The book is out of print (a modified paperback version is available from Amazon but I've looked and never found one in stores) and like "House of Leaves" would be nearly impossible to turn into a movie. It's strange and flawed (the best ones always are) but there's something about it that is fun, rewarding and heartwarming/breaking. About halfway through my rereading of it I've passed my favorite section and can definitively say that it is in fact, my favorite book.

But you might not like it at all. Nineteen reviewers on Amazon have given it an average rating of 4.5 stars out of 5, but McSweeney's fans tend to be pretentious and like things that you've never heard of just because you've never heard of it. They can be spotted by their expensive pants and constant insulting of anything mainstream. I like the Olive Garden and usually wear cheap jeans (though I've recently received a pair of GAP jeans and like them) so maybe there is a bit of crossover appeal with this one.

"Whooah, we're half way there"

There's something I'll never understand about the die-hard sports fans of the world. I enjoy sports, I enjoy going to sporting events and even talking about sporting events. And I'm not talking about the guy with the jersey or the girl with the big foam finger. They're cool with me and I get their excitement. But the guy at the Raiders' game wearing the Darth Vader suit or the skulls and spikes? Or the guy at the Sabercats' game with the green Mohawk and face paint? I really don't understand that.

Raiders fans have a bit of an excuse. Their families could be multi-generation fans. It's like racism: They grew up with it, and it's really all they know. But the San Jose Arena Football team was founded in 1995, which means that at some point in the past 13 years, this guy who is at least 40, made a conscious, if not entirely well-thought-out decision, to become a crazy fan of a new team playing a sport that is very exciting, but let's face it, not quite in the mainstream. I don't mean to sound elitist or snobby (despite the implication that, like racists, Raiders' fans are ignorant) but the Philadelphia Soul is owned by Jon Bon Jovi, making him by far the most famous name in the Arena Football League. The second most famous name is probably Richie Sambora, another of the team's co-owners and lead guitarist for Bon Jovi.

So this started because my dad had made some comments about how cool it would be to go to an arena game. The field is only 50 yards long (usually played at an ice hockey arena) and instead of out-of-bounds there is a padded wall. I looked into tickets and found a family pack of four that came with four hot dogs, four bags of chips, and four sodas. The seats were behind the end zone, 10 rows back so I dropped $60 and took along Adam and Jaedon because it's always cool to take 3-4 generations of a family on an outing (besides which, I had to buy seats in multiples of four).

Other than the exhilarating quick-paced gameplay, they do a lot to get fans into the game, and the things they do are all of a certain type. Let's say that there are a lot of things that would be really exciting and interesting if I was really drunk and they did several of them at the game.

Before the team comes out of the locker room fog billows out of the tunnel and a motorcycle revs its engine unseen somewhere. Suddenly some dude wearing a Sabercats shirt and a bandanna on his bald head rides a Harley out to the 25-yard line prompting Adam to lean over and ask, "Who the hell is that supposed to be?" I shrug and smile at the ridiculousness of it all as the team runs out to fireworks and applause. Now, drunk Zac would have loved the Harley, the no helmet wearing, the cheerleaders and the fireworks; sober Zac just liked the latter two.

The same AC/DC song plays every time the Cats kickoff (they scored 70 to the LA Avengers' 42 so it was very often that the intro to "TNT" played in the arena) which can get a little repetitive - but drunk Zac would have eaten it up (it is a great riff and it didn't actually get old until the last two times they played it because I was pretty tired). Though sober Zac understands and supports the decision to film from above a group of skinny blondes in green tank tops and show them on the big screen over and over throughout the night.

Maybe it's because my dad isn't a die-hard sports nut, or maybe, like Howard Stern said in his autobiographical movie when his station switched to country music, "I just don't get it. Explain it to me. And maybe it's 'cause I went to college, and I never drove a truck and had sex with my daddy's sister."

That said, at one point they came out with a slingshot and asked "Who likes T-shirts?" I definitely yelled that in fact, I did. And when the same guy that rode the motorcycle came out with a pneumatic shirt-launching gun my first thought was definitely, "That's how Maude Flanders died."

Jaedon, when the motorcycle dude rode onto the field with a cheerleader on the back, asked me, "Why is that girl riding with him?" She was getting a lift to the far end of the arena to hand out free pizzas to the people in row 24 of section 103 but at the time I didn't know that and told him the truth without hesitation, "Because chicks dig motorcycles."

I mention all the weird parts only because they were all so much fun. I don't want to sound like a snob because it was a great game, and very exciting to watch. I'd absolutely go back again (I'd gone once before years ago when I won tickets from channel 20) especially if I can rock the same deal we had last night.

Late in the third quarter, Jaedon told me that it's a good thing I don't live in LA anymore, because they were losing by a lot. I told him yeah, but told myself that it's a good thing because if I did still live there I wouldn't have bothered to come up to go to an Arena Football Game with my family. And if I was only up for a weekend I wouldn't take the time to go to a game in San Jose, which makes nights like last night the exact reason I'm back for good.

One awesome, please

Despite years of warnings from my mother, today I took some candy from a stranger.

I found myself in the mall, of all places, and as I was walking out an old mustachioed man whose job it is to replace the candy in those machines they have called out to me. "Hey buddy, can I borrow your hands for a second?" I walk over and he asks me to hold open a long plastic bag as he pours, from a box, multi-colored Smartie-esque candies that are the size of golf balls.

The box weighed about 5 pounds or so, so it takes about 30 seconds of careful pouring to get everything where it needs to be. As he's done he says thanks and I take a half a step away before he asks, "You want a couple?" I think to myself: "What am I, going to not take free candy?" I reach in and take out a pair as the old man tells me, "Thanks a lot. I don't care what they say, you're a good guy." This cracked me up to no end as I walked away and popped one of the balls in my mouth (that's what she said).

But before I left the mall, and before I scored candy and was told that all my detractors are wrong, I went into a store that sells board games, drinking games, chess sets, stickers, gags and magic, swords, and has a walk-in humidor. I don't know what it was called, but if anyone ever asks me, "Zac, I'm looking for the world's awesomest store because I'm running low on awesome. Do you know where I can find one?" I will tell that person, yes. It can be found on the bottom level of Newpark Mall, of all places.