"Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing."
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Thursday
Long day and drop in with EH at the end. They’ve settled LEW at 1:00 am, talked the client into a shitty deal but the lawyers are making out fine. A cynical settlement and both JL and I comment that the judge should perhaps not approve. EH starts it off slow, new trainer C plunks down beside me, she is a talkative sort and hope she can make it. She is probably 30, big blue eyes and tattoos all over her back which I try not to notice as she wobbles in side plank next to me.
Friday
Long day, trolling downtown sf, feel like I should be in a short skirt and eight inch heels; a strange place to be.
Done by 4:00, and head in for late yoga. Pradeep has two classes, 4:30 to 5:30, then 5:30 till 6:45. It used to be 5:30 to 7:00 but hey, cut backs are everywhere. The 4:30 to 5:30 is hard; very hard. Bunch of core and push-up work and after 60 minutes drenched and fried. Take a long drink and seriously consider stopping there, but don’t. Class two comes in and he puts the hammer down for 60 minutes, then 40 minutes of release. The 75 minute class stretches to 100, I don’t think he ever thought about the clock. Thoroughly rung out; my towel and mat are soaked after 155 minutes.
Go in Saturday am to drive Leo Kottke to the airport. Leo is affable and we talk about his gigs, kids, skateboarding, scooters, emergency rooms, photo shoots in old porn studios, visiting prisons and being stuck. He asks about why I am doing this; I tell him-he is impressed or at least amused saying simply: “that’s smart.” He shares his own stories of recharge and oh to be in one of those bars or hotel lobbies and have Leo come set up in a corner. We keep talking at the white curb, he closes out with a story about being on a submarine driven into a pier twice and the noise it made. It is clear he had fun too for 25 minutes and both of us left grinning.
Get home, Brigid planning for her teenage sleep over. I stroll through a crowded Costo, multi-tasking in trying to download Vaseline Machine Gun to my phone. ITunes has changed its licensing agreement. Fifty five pages on an iphone screen, I press ok after the first and will hope for the best. My credit card has expired and I am pissing off old folks who are buying Depends in volume, so I pull over in from of an Everest sized display of Honey Bunches of Oats so I can update my credit card info to download a tune I have not heard in twenty years. I get Rose on a marsh walk late and watch White Tailed Kites hover over the mud listening to a makeshift play list of Leo, McMurtry, Gillian Welch and Steve Earle. We get home and I help Brigid clean up.
Its 6:00 and I am warming pizzas for the masses thinking a VO2 max session, 25 minutes of snatches may happen. Then I see the size of the teenaged boys coming in and quickly decide they are not leaving my sight. Way too many hormones and way too much biomass. There will be adult supervision; at least I will stay awake as long as I can.
Leo put Vaseline Machine Gun on Six and Twelve String Guitar which came out in the early 70’s. I remember listening to it driving up Mt. Tamalpais when we should have been in school. We rarely drove drunk, we were responsible truants if you look past the psychedelics. I remember the cassettes I recorded from Nick Gill’s record collection in Berkeley 1982, staying up way too late with Leo and Lowell George (Thanks, I’ll Eat it Here). I remember vividly plugging Leo into the walkman (they stopped making them last week) and skiing deep powder in the tight trees in the upper reaches of Taos Ski Valley in the early Spring of ’84, which is the last time I felt as beastly fit as I do now, though I would not last twenty feet in those trees today. They are bigger and I am slower.
Truth is though, as clear as I remember it, as Leo says here: I don’t know that guy any more. The music still sounds really good.
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