What I Saw in California Episode 05: Two Walks
Nobody's Property
Summer 2003: I walk past the Balboa park BART station, here in the south-central outskirts of San Francisco. This place is not on the maps of the city that you see in the Travel pages or in guidebooks; usually it gets cut off just below the Mission. This is the las stop before Daly City. It is a place eviscerated by freeways, BART tracks, MUNI lines—bypassed, razor-wired, forgotten. But people live here, and on the side streets you can see sherbet-colored stucco bungalows built before World War II. The place is like a jigsaw puzzle made up of mismatched pieces from different boxes. You...
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What I Saw in California Episode 04: Atascadero
Nobody's Property
My instinct, mid-stream in the molasses flow of late-afternoon San Francisco traffic, was to just keep moving. This was getting us nowhere. Mom sat beside me listlessly looking out the car window while I steered us around and around, trying to make out the logic of this neighborhood: a tangle of pockmarked city streets, overpasses, skyways, and gracelessly aging industrial buildings that housed sweatshops and auto mechanics. Here and there an artist had carved out a space in all the late-industrial jumble, but SoMa, that amalgam of material desire and millennial longing, hadn't been invented...
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What I Saw in California Episode 03: Thunderbird
Nobody's Property
I measure the imported rice, squeeze the plum tomatoes and chop them, chop the flat-leaf parsley and rosemary from the garden, the garlic, the onion. I grate the cheese and dice the celery, drizzle olive oil into a heavy casserole, eyeballing the measure. In go the garlic and celery. Dinner will be tomato parmesan risotto and rabbit with white wine sauce. The rabbit pieces are soaking in cold water in a clear glass bowl in the deep stainless sink. I lift each piece out and let it drip, then put it on paper towels I have spread on the granite counter. When all of the bits of the small body are...
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What I Saw in California Episode 02: Domestic Water
Nobody's Property
Up at Pulgas Ridge Megadog and I walk the Cordilleras Trail past the multiple-addiction rehab center tucked at the edge of San Francisco Water Department land. This open space, reserved for hikers and their dogs, is flanked by the rehab on one side and the county mental health services on the other. Sometimes we see guys playing basketball out in back of the rehab building, its tile roof and pale stucco walls aging with Katherine Hepburn style under California live oaks. Sometimes we see them tending their garden, where tomatoes still ripen on the vine on into the fall. Occasionally, they are...
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What I Saw in California Episode 01: Sweet Marie
Nobody's Property
It doesn’t help that I have PMS on the day my chicken dies. I find her in the backyard coop, one wing drooping out of the nest, her head lolling. I have always told myself that if illness struck my tiny flock of two I would face it with the pragmatic detachment of a farmer, letting nature take its course or, in the interest of humane treatment, helping nature along by whatever means I had at my disposal (but not owning an axe, I’m not sure what I expected I would do: twist the necks of birds I had named “Visions of Johanna” and “Absolutely Sweet Marie”?) ...
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Nobody's Property Episode 15: Rose
Nobody's Property
Three o’clock in the afternoon, and Shirley, of Shawnee Memorials, just across Harrison Avenue from Fairview Cemetery, was not taking any shit off my dad. ...
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Nobody's Property Episode 14: Stupid
Nobody's Property
The sound of pistons pumping, a lawn-mower pulse and wheeze, comes up behind her, and she looks over her shoulder to see the VW coming up fast: black and chrome, some of the shine worn off and anyway looking duller in this flat November light. She keeps her thumbs hooked under the leather of her backpack straps, walks backward and keeps her gaze straight and sober toward the driver of the car. It pulls over a few paces ahead and stops at an angle on the gravel margin. Under her boots the gray gravel rasps and she doesn't slow down or speed up but keeps up her trudge toward the car. In one...
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Nobody's Property Episode 13: Terminal Burrowing
Nobody's Property
"I serve with the German Armed Forces. My garrison is Hardheim, where I am stationed at Carl-Schurz-Kaserne. At present, I attend the Bundeswehrfachschule in Tauberbischofsheim. ...
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Nobody's Property Episode 12: What I Know
Nobody's Property
Terminal burrowing can be identified in reports of hypothermia deaths, but has only recently been given a name. It is a behavior pattern observed in the last stages of hypothermia whereby the afflicted will enter small, enclosed spaces, such as wardrobes, cupboards, and closets. ...
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Sequoiacast Episode 03: Senseless
Nobody's Property
She's six years oldAll she sees are dirty walls around her Men coming in and out the front door She wants to run cry and yell But there is nobody there to help She sees many different faces Touching them in all the wrong places Hearing the door open and close She follows him because she is the one he chose
info_outlineThe sound of pistons pumping, a lawn-mower pulse and wheeze, comes up behind her, and she looks over her shoulder to see the VW coming up fast: black and chrome, some of the shine worn off and anyway looking duller in this flat November light. She keeps her thumbs hooked under the leather of her backpack straps, walks backward and keeps her gaze straight and sober toward the driver of the car. It pulls over a few paces ahead and stops at an angle on the gravel margin. Under her boots the gray gravel rasps and she doesn't slow down or speed up but keeps up her trudge toward the car. In one version of the story she opens the passenger door herself; in another, the driver pushes the door open and it swings out in front of her like a gate, so that if she had wanted to keep going she couldn't; but she doesn't want to keep going.
Translation by Johan Sussenberger
Music by Kristin Hersh: kristinhersh.cashmusic.org or www.kristinhersh.com