We tried to get to The Two Towers today. K wanted to see Gangs of New York. I'm willing but rather more excited about Towers. The theater in downtown Berkeley that's showing Towers is crappy. Crappy! They play a stupid self-promoting slide show, and canned djs hype piped-in pop music. When the lights go down the commercials start. Unlike in Europe where the commercials shown in theaters are clever mini-movies these are the same 30 second time wasters that fatten up skinny television shows. Then the previews. Several. Then the movie! Last time we went we vowed not to go again.

I thought it might be fun to try the new megaplex in Emeryville. No other city around here likes buildings like Emeryville. We left in plenty of time and got lost. Emeryville seems to squeeze itself between freeway and railroad tracks and it's always amazingly hard to figure out how to get from the one side to the other. We spotted the AMC sign but were on the wrong side of the tracks with no obvious way to get where we wanted to go. And when we did find throughway, traffic was way bad. By the time we found the place we were a couple minutes late and K, who was driving, was majorly stressed. I knew he would not be able to get into the movie. So we bailed.

Well. I did hope we could see The Two Towers at Jack London Square. But I thought it would be a nice place to hang out yes or no. At first Kent just wanted to forget the whole thing, go home, but acquiesced, and Jack London Square proved to be a balm. Lovely sky layered in blue and strips of white. At the dock by Scott's two Oakland firemen were handing out fliers asking folks to protest the closing of the Jack London Square fire station. My fireman in his overalls and tshirt was middle aged, some lines on his face, his tan reddish. A ball of a bicep showed under his sleeve, blond hairs on his forearm. "The critical time for a non-breathing victim is 4 to 6 minutes," said the flier. My fireman gestured at the train that was passing, cutting the docks off from the city, and expanded, "That train doesn't always just pass on through. Sometimes it stops or backs up. There's no way to get an emergency vehicle by."

They had to go then. Tromped down to the fireboat, untied it, and pushed out into the estuary. As they got out midstream they turned on three nozzles -- one on the front deck, one at the back, the third on the cabin's roof -- and great jets of water arched in the air.

Pity to lose that, eh?

The fireboat gone, K & I sat for awhile on the slowly heaving concrete dock. Three mallards paddled by. A gray and white gull with black feet and legs and a red-orange beak stopped on a corner of the dock and eyed us, first one eye then the other. The gull was quite pretty, clean and bright.

We ate at Scott's. I had a glass of wine. Seven dollars. And the food was neither inexpensive nor impressive. But the setting was pleasant and we felt taken care of when someone came by and twisted the pepper grinder over our servings of fish.

The theater at the square wasn't showing anything at a convenient time. We decided not to hang around another hour or more. So we came home. I have to go throw laundry in the dryer, I guess. Oh, yeah. I finally resurrected the Poetry & Pizza website.