Knit Sisters

I’ll come clean about that title: Berkeley Eclogue is actually the title of a poem by Robert Hass, who has a lot of lovely Northern California poems to his credit. But since I was actually out in Berkeley for a whirlwind forty-seven hours earlier this week and I’m still in a recovery period, I figured I’d just borrow from Bob.

Besides, “eclogue” is a word that comes from the Greek and means short, pastoral poem, usually in the form of a dialogue between two shepherds.

I love the idea of a couple of Greek shepherds having a dialogue about Berkeley.

Dystopia the Shepherd: Diabetes, this place is as weird as Diogenes of Sinope in a business suit. I am prepared for glory, yet I can make neither heads nor tails of the people here.

Diabetes the Shepherd: Oh, I don’t know, Dystopia, I kind of like it. Dude, it’s got a lot of beautiful flowers.

And I’ve just, like, moved into a commune where all the members, like, drink human breast milk! Plus I have, like, an appointment this afternoon to get my aura washed and then I’m going to my Bikram yoga class.

Dude, it’s enlightened! Plus loafing around the commune fondling someone’s breasts—in a totally non-sexual way, dude—beats the living crap out of eking out a meager living by herding sheep all day.

Dystopia: Diabetes, the code of ancient Sparta does not condone yoga and communes, much less the consumption of human breast milk. I myself will repair to the local travel agency, Trip Out Travel!, and return to Greece.

(Note: You probably think Trip Out Travel! is just another one of my jokes, but no. It’s a real travel agency on College Avenue. What did I tell you about Berkeley being a very bad place for a satirist?)

That said, I had a really great time. I genuinely love being in Berkeley for short bursts. For one thing, there are the aforementioned flowers, which bloom all year round:

These flowers go with…

…this house. I feel certain that the person who lives here did something commendable in a previous life.

Let us compare the yard above with my own yard:

According to the karmic metric I have used above, I must have spent my previous life torturing squirrels and selling heroin to school children.

But I digress. There are redwoods:

And palm trees:

And old Victorian houses with vegetal overgrowth that is nothing short of gothic:

But most of all, when I make these brief visits, I get to see all my wonderful Berkeley friends, none of whom live in communes or incline to coffee enemas, and it’s always absolutely terrific. I’ve also learned that if you stay only two days, you simply don’t encounter that many of the maddening aspects of Berkeley. Then you’re back in New England—in the stiff and chilly but somehow comforting embrace of the descendants of Cotton Mather—faster than you can say, “War is not good for children and other living things.”

Of course, I did say that you don’t encounter “that many” of the insanity-provoking things about Berkeley. Some you simply cannot avoid. To that end, I need to “share” with you a new feature of Berkeley city planning, which to all evidence is done by malevolent chimpanzees.

See what that is? Yeah, it’s a roundabout. A very small roundabout on a side street, of a sort that seems to have sprung up all around town. Like poisonous mushrooms in the night.

Look closely and you will see that right in the middle of the very small roundabout there is a tree. Right now, it is a very small tree in the middle of the very small roundabout, but things grow out there like they do in a jungle. Let me assure you, that tree will get very large very fast.

And then?

Right. You won’t be able to see any of the oncoming traffic as you enter the roundabout.

Well done, Berkeley. Well done.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 11:38 am and is filed under The new yoga. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.