Living Above the Fold

EIGHT YEARS AGO, JUDY LEE’S CAR WAS ON ITS LAST LEGS. The busy San Francisco resident never had the time to properly maintain her car, and now it was falling apart. Worse, parking was so scarce in her Mission district neighborhood that she was always getting parking tickets.

“ Like everyone in the Bay Area, I originally came from the East Coast where everyone has a car,” says Lee, 32. “I was addicted to having a car. It was hard to imagine any other way of doing things.”

Taking Turns (The East Bay Monthly, September 2006)

Romy Mimi Ilano, 34, draws comics. But her work doesn’t look like the strips in the daily newspaper. Instead, it’s brimming with surreal, free-associative images—cat-headed women, killer cupcakes, a living scarf that eagerly whimpers, “Meep! Meep! Meep!” as its wearer stuffs it into his coat pocket. Then there are the strange storylines, which segue smoothly into totally unrelated plots, each a hodgepodge gumbo with its own dream logic. Ilano, who lives in Oakland, names autobiographical cartoonist Lynda Barry as inspiration. Clearly, though, her fluid, meandering stories and blunt, aggressive linework are all her own.

You Call This Funny? (East Bay Monthly, July 2010)

I went camping for the first time two years ago with three friends in Lassen Volcanic National Park near Redding. We intended to enjoy a weekend roughing it in the wilderness, but the trip didn’t go as smoothly as planned.

The Path Less Traveled (The East Bay Monthly, June 2010)

Manuel de Paz is a short, bespectacled man from El Salvador with a scruffy goatee and a round, friendly face that belies his turbulent past. He’s lived in the United States for almost two decades, though he still speaks with a slight Spanish accent. Dressed in jeans and a black turtleneck, he looks casual as he walks around the basement offices of the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, where he works as community outreach coordinator.

Sanctuary from the Storm (The East Bay Monthly, December 2007)

They call it the Iron Triangle. It’s an impoverished south Richmond neighborhood, wedged between the Union Pacific Railroad tracks and Interstate 580, that the rest of the city sometimes would rather forget. The streets are threadbare and abandoned; weeds burst through cracks in the sidewalks. The homes here have high fences around their yards and iron bars on their windows. Just walking down the street can be deadly. Gangs work the streets here and many young, jobless men spend their days selling drugs from doorsteps. Many of them have been to jail; many of them expect to go back.

Breaking the Cycle (The East Bay Monthly, December 2007)

Katie Senser stumbled across her first geocache by accident.

She was picnicking with friends at Bald Rock, a barren, wind-swept expanse of granite overlooking the Feather River outside Oroville north of Sacramento. It’s a quiet, eerie place, where the wind howls mournfully as it whips through the craggy formations and the only evidence of human activity is small depressions in the rock, worn over centuries, where the local Maidu Indians ground acorns into meal. But it soon turned out that Senser, a Chico art student, and her companions weren’t the first visitors this century.

Hunters and Geo-Gatherers (The East Bay Monthly, February 2010)

When I was a kid, my grandmother delighted in telling us about the ghost that haunted her childhood home back in Germany. Every night, she said, the family heard mysterious rattling on the staircase from dusk to dawn. I never really believed her—and, from the way she told it, she didn’t really believe in that ghost, either—but it made a great spooky story. And ever since then, in the back of my mind, I always hoped that someday I’d meet a ghost for myself. Because, well, you never know.

You Never Know (The East Bay Monthly, January 1 2010)

In a Concord backyard, Sandy (no last name) lugs an animal carrier into a small wire pen. She opens the door and four long, skinny animals slink out—Sandy identifies them as Puff, Hawley, Boo, and Walter Frederick “Fred” Ferretude. Puff, Boo, and Fred waddle around exploring, sniffing the ground, but Hawley doesn’t want to stay put. She scratches at the dirt with her long claws, hoping to dig her way out of the pen to explore the rest of the yard. These are ferrets: cute, clumsy—and illegal. California is one of only two states where it is against the law to own a pet ferret.

“Not everyone knows about ferrets,” Sandy says. Sandy can’t give her full name, because she’s harboring wanted fugitives. “But everyone in the ferret underground knows.”

Furry Fugitives (The East Bay Monthly, January 1 2010)

You can’t visit Iceland without going to the Icelandic Penis Museum.

The rest of the country is nice too—pristine volcanic tundra, stunning iceberg seas, boiling thermal hotpots—but the real reason tourists come, even when they won’t admit it, is to giggle and titter at this basement gallery, where every variety of animal phallus is on display, neatly jarred and labeled like fruit preserves. So when I spent the holidays with family in the capital of Reykjavik in 2002, I knew that I had to see it for myself.

Members Only (The East Bay Monthly, June 2008)

This is a holiday essay I wrote about the last Christmas that I spent with my grandmother, Oma. This is a pretty personal topic for me and quite a bit unlike most of the other posts I’ve made on this site so far.  I don’t think there’s much that I can say about this that won’t be clear from the piece itself.  I only hope that it gives you some small idea of what an amazing woman my grandmother was,

Oma (The East Bay Monthly, December 2008)