jakit

Mix-Master

A few years ago my good friend (and Oakland's Best Bartender) decided that he needed to take his career to the next level and, so, Alex Smith left a rather cush bar-manager job at Catos Alehouse in Oakland to begin working for various hipster bars in the City. Besides simply offering a much-needed change of location, these San Francisco gigs also exposed him to the cool new scene of cocktail-mixing; a scene at which he soon found himself to be quite adept.

Alex has been so successful with the mixology, in fact, that he recently won a trip to France based upon one of his original recipes. Now, another creation of his, the Hibiscus Tequila Fizz, is being featured in the current issue of Sunset magazine.

Cato's hasn't been the same since Alex left. Nevertheless, I wish him well in his new endeavours.

Congrats, Alex!

Lucia Marin Horvath

Little Luce was born on Tuesday, February 9th; three weeks early and two days after her mother's birthday.

Weighing 6.7 pounds, she entered the world quickly, but intensely, and has since wisely decided to just snooze her days away.

Unlike Julian, who came crashing-in on the heels of a fortuitously-timed bender, Lucia's birth brings with it no crazy story. Instead, she's generously provided me with an opportunity to reflect upon what Erika and I have been through in our quest to form a family.

To be honest, there were many moments over the last few years in which I wondered if we would ever get to this point.

It was back in 2006 when I received the test-results that felt, upon first impression, worse than a death sentence; a big goose egg on the sperm count. It appeared as if I would never be able to have children of my own.

Eventually, further tests would reveal the cause of this deficiency. It turns out that I carried a single cystic-fibrosis gene; not enough to give me the disease to such an extent that I would succumb to it, but enough to give me several of its nasty conditions. Primarily, in this context, I was born without a vas deferens.

This meant that my boys could swim; they just couldn't get out of the damn pool.

Thankfully, due to mega-super-hyper-advanced technology (and a lot of money, mostly provided by fabulous relatives,) we were able to do what would have been impossible only fifteen years ago.

Having become rather Luddite-ish lately, this has presented me with a sort-of existentialist conundrum. Still, I'll trade esoteric ideals for awesome little kids any day of the week.

And so, I will always be eternally grateful to the brilliant scientists and doctors who gave me what I was, apparently, not supposed to have- a beautiful, precious and most-fantastic little family.

Kudos, of course, to my heroic wife for doing her share of the family-creation, as well ;)

So the bears are packed with cocaine?

The saga of the missing bears just keeps getting bigger.

Amazingly.

We're talking front page of the Oakland Tribune and three television news stories bigger.

Yeah.

Fer real.

I won't provide all the relevant links here, since they're already on the missing bears page, but I will connect you to the comments from a blog entry about the bears on SFist because they perfectly capture the story's appeal.

However, even though it's fun to watch all this happen, it is also slightly disturbing.

Last night, as I stood in front of Catos Alehouse and watched my buddy Chris get interviewed by Channel 7 News, I couldn't help but ponder our strange society. I mean, this is a guy who has composed music for, and acted in, several local independent films (all done brilliantly, I might add) and, yet, his first significant press is coming because he lost a couple of toys?

Yeeesh.

Perhaps, out of all this, more people will come to appreciate his music.

And, on that note, if these bears do get found, the story will only get bigger still.

C'mon bears! Come home!

The Bearz Are Missing!

Ferreira and Atsuko's beloved bearz have been lost. Alas, this has happened right on the eve of the release of their latest music video.

Click here to find out more.

Our Royal Highness

Every night, for a long time now, when Julian gets out of the bathtub he expects to find his milk bottle and pacifier set atop the short bookshelf next to his bed. He also demands that his bath towel be placed on his head and around his shoulders, like a cloak.

Then, as always, he exits the bathroom, walks a few steps down the hall and enters his bedroom. Upon seeing his beloved nighttime comforts sitting right where they're supposed to be, he casts the towel off his body and scrambles over to the bookshelf, cheering with glee the entire way.

It really is quite a sight.

I'm not sure what to expect in the future, however. He does know that we're not of royal blood, I hope.

The Next Generation

No-So-Little Farm

This morning Julian and I met Noah, Lilly and Noah's mom at Little Farm in Tilden Park. Julian insisted that we were going to Big Farm, however, not Little Farm.

Julian and Lilly had a lot of fun feeding celery to the goats and sheep. "There's another goat!" The weather was beautiful.

My favorite part was when little J and I sat on the hill above the parking lot and ate our picnic lunch together. Just two guys eating a peanut butter sandwich.

Good times.

Every so often over the last two years I've felt as though my enjoyment of Julian has peaked. It seems impossible that it could get any better. And then, lo-and-behold, it does. 

Right now, I can't possibly see how I could ever be more in love with him. Yet, I know, so much lies ahead; baseball games, philosophical conversations, those moments when he'll need my advice, those times when he'll teach me something.

I really don't know what the future holds. All I know is that I'm looking forward to it.

New Word

Julian just said the word "Catos" for the first time!

I'm so proud.

Yep, Life is Pretty Cool

Sippy Cup

I tried to capture Julian being silly with the sippy cup, but he was too fascinated with my laptop computer (which is where the video camera is.)

Opening Present

Grandma Sue sent down a little present for Julian. We decided to let him open it himself. It took awhile, and a bit of help, but eventually he found the tiny cow and pig; though the wrapping was more interesting.

Tasting Carrot

  Tasting Carrot 
  Originally uploaded by Erikabaldwin

The little feller sits at the table with us and eats like one of the gang. We even used this chair at the Cerrito Theater on Baby Brigade night so that he could watch an interesting German movie with his folks. He really seemed to be into it.

This is his first carrot, by the way.

Happy Bagel

  Happy Bagel 
  Originally uploaded by Erikabaldwin

That's my boy.

Lil' Sleeper

Its 11:40 on Wednesday night. Julian is soundly sleeping and I can't wait for him to wake up for a feeding so that I can hold him again. It's just such a wonder that he's mine; something so amazing and precious is mine for keeps. How'd I get away with this?

The Bug

The Bug has his night time hours down pretty well now. He goes to bed with Erika around ten or eleven. He'll wake up three times in the night for a feeding. I get up and change his diaper before Erika feeds him. Then, around 8:00am, he wakes up for the day.

Erika will get up at this time and take a shower and try to eat some breakfast, leaving me with the little guy. At first he just makes a lot of noise and waves his arms around, bopping me in the nose. It's utterly impossible to sleep through this, but I try nonetheless. Eventually, however, he gets upset at lying on his back and begins to cry in frustration that his day has yet to begin.

At this point I pick him up and put him on my lap and he starts to smile and giggle. Then I'm happy to be awake and my day starts off about as wonderfully as one could possibly hope.

Julian Hice Horvath

There's pretty much one day out of the year that you can guarantee I'll be hung over. It's not the day after Fourth of July or New Years or even my birthday. Heck, I've been known to take it easy now and again. No, the one day where it's absolutely assured that Chris Horvath will be desperately seeking the hair of the dog that bit him, is the day that follows the famous House of Prime Rib Night.

For those not hip to the scene, House of Prime Rib Night is the annual event where my good friends Blake and Jon and I go for a pre-Christmas dinner at the, aptly named, House of Prime Rib restaurant in San Francisco. We've been doing it every December for a whopping 14 years now. I think that's pretty good tradition for such young lads as ourselves.

Basically, the night consists of getting all dressed up in suits and indulging in a good ol' fashioned steak while washing it down with several bottles of fine wine. All day long, before and after the meal, we hit a bunch of fancy bars and pretend we're a lot swankier than we really are. A very Dionysian experinece, if I may say so.

For those keeping score, my intake last Tuesday consisted of (in order):

- 2 glasses of French Rhone wine
- 1 pint of oatmeal stout
- 1 Manhattan (sweet vermouth and bourbon)
- 1 bottle of Anchor Steam beer
- 2 glasses of Duckhorn Vineyards cabernet
- 2 glasses of Grgich Hills cabernet
- 1 glass of Royal Tokay dessert wine (my favorite)
- 1 glass of Glenfiddich 10-Year scotch
- 1 pint of Madredeus belgian ale
- 1 bottle Samuel Adams lager

Combine that with a bunch of cheap cigars and an end-of-the-night, multi-hour, undefeated run at Street Fighter 2 until the wee hours and you begin to get an idea of how I felt waking up on Wednesday morning... er... afternoon.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, because it was this particular day that my son decided he wanted to check himself into the world. Which is fine by me, except that I wasn't quite ready for it. He was, after all, fifteen days early. And I was, you know, quite beat.

Birth is quite a laborious experience; hence the term- labor. Yeah I know, not so much for me as much as for Erika. But you need to understand that for the last nine months everyone I know that's been through the experience themselves has decided to regale me with their horrific tales of 36-hour births and adamant pledges of "never again." The birthing industry doesn't help either as it seems their only goal is to scare the bejesus out of soon-to-be parents in order to get them to cough up more cash.

In sharp contrast to all that, Erika wanted a completely natural birth with no medication or pain-killers whatsoever. She felt that if women could do it that way for the previous ten thousand years then there's no reason she couldn't as well. Especially since medications only result in increasing the chances of something else going wrong later. Apparently a whopping 30% of all births today are performed via C-Section.

In order to help her achieve her goal we hired a doula and attended a birthing class. This was an extremely important event in her life and she wanted it to be a great experience. The pressure was on. I even had Blake schedule the House of Prime Rib night a week earlier than normal in order to avoid any possible overlap. A lot of good that did.

So here I find myself Wednesday afternoon crawling up to Piedmont Ave for some coffee and a quesadilla when Erika calls to tell me that her water had broken. She then promptly got off the phone. Now I knew that water breaking had something to do with birth, but I wasn't sure exactly what it meant. Was he coming now? Or could this just mean he's getting ready and he might arrive in the next week or so? I called Emily, our doula, and she told me that he is, in fact, coming now. Yikes.

We quickly went to the doctor's office. She checked Erika out and then sent her home. She told us to head to the hospital when her contractions reached a certain frequency. I actually went to work that night while Erika began her labor. The doctor had instructed her just to go to sleep anyway and I was already having anxiety about private school tuition so I decided I better go make some money.

At midnight we checked into Alta Bates hospital and soon after things began rolling.

I helped out through the whole process, even holding Erika's legs and head up as she pushed. I saw Julian's head slowly poke out into the world. It was thrilling but I began to get quite nervous about the fact that his hair was dark brown and not blond. Did they switch the embryos? They totally could have. I had been thinking about that possibility ever since the pregnancy began. What if this isn't my kid? What am I gonna do?

By the time they finally pulled him out I had worked myself into such a tizzy that when I stared at his purple and black body covered in white gunk and blood and looking like he was an extra from the Star Wars Cantina scene, I was quite positive that he was definitely not my child.

But then they cleaned him up and put him on my lap and I pondered him more closely and decided that he was so darn cute that I was gonna keep him anyway. That's when I pulled out my phone and took his first picture which I promptly sent out to friends and family.

In the end, everything worked out perfectly. Erika had the completely natural birth that she wanted and Julian is as healthy as can be. The hospital staff even commented that my hang-over was advantageous because it kept me cool, calm and collected throughout (little did they know that I'm an ace pizza driver and that I'm always like that.)

We stayed in the hospital until Saturday and friends and family members came by and visited.  Towards the end of the night on Thursday we pulled out his zeroest birthday cake and celebrated his literal birth day.

Now Julian's home with us and life couldn't be more fun. There's no better feeling in the world then having the little guy sleep on my chest and wrap his arms around me like he's giving me a big hug. Even his crying is all worth it for that wonderful moment when you can get him to feel safe and stop. And watching him occasionally open his eyes and take in the world is indescribable.

As I sit here now and write this, I look at him on my lap and think about what a long, arduous journey it was to get here. About this time last year I was frantically scouring the internet trying to learn anything I could about my recently discovered medical condition and wondering if I would ever be able to have my own children. With financial thanks to my mom and grandparents and some amazing technology I truly feel like one lucky guy.

Anyway, ya'll should come by and see him. He loves visitors and he's pretty mellow most of the time. He only woke up twice last night and both Erika and I have been getting decent sleep. If you're interested you can check back here for more pictures in a photo album I'll create and also stop by Erika's site for her take on the whole deal.

Welcome to the world, Julian.

Dave Daramus

The last five days have been tough.

I must confess, I didn't know Dave all that well. He was more the friend of Ed and my brother, Adrian. They had all been close pals since their time at Berkeley, which was about twenty years ago.

For the first ten years, or so, of their friendship, I only saw Dave occasionally, like when I went over to Ed and Dave's house to play poker, or something of that sort.

However, I got to know him much better in the late 90's. He lived near Piedmont Avenue and so he was often at Catos and on the street and so on. We invited him to all our parties and he became quite a fixture from that era for me.

I didn't think much about him then. I liked him. Who didn't? But he was just a guy. A nice guy, a fun guy, but nobody I considered much. He was just there.

Then things changed.

I guess he slowly disappeared first. Before I really even noticed that he was missing, I heard that he and Ed were no longer living together. Next, I learned that he had become a strict vegan raw-foodist. He appeared to be changing his lifestyle drastically.

I didn't see him much during this period, I just heard things. There were stories here and there. For instance, he would, apparently, carry a bag of kale around with him and eat nothing else. If he was stuck in a restaurant for some reason, he would simply eat the parsley and nothing else.

Then, I heard that he sold all his possessions and was moving to Hawaii to work on an organic farm.

Whereas others were perplexed by his strange behavior, I found it all quite interesting.

I thought perhaps I would never see him again, but he seemed to know what he was doing and he was on some kind of journey, and so I sadly bid him farewell, in my own private way.

Around this time I too began to embrace food in a new way, albeit not nearly to the same extreme.

Unfortunately, Dave was soon back from Hawaii and I think it was then that the aura surrounding all his changes for me began to fade. Maybe he wasn't so sure, after all. I began to worry about him.

I wanted to see him, to talk to him. I wanted to ask him about all that was going on in his head. I wanted to learn from him. I wanted to learn from this new spiritual soul.

At the same time, I wanted to help him. Deep down, I could see his weakness. Perhaps because it is the same as my own weakness and in that sense it was glaringly obvious. For that reason, I thought we could connect, that we could talk.

I wanted to both celebrate and save the new Dave. These seemingly contradictory feelings still trouble me deeply.

I respect all that he did, even as I see that he was killing himself slowly. I looked up to his new strengths, even while I pitied our shared weaknesses.

He was taking control of his diet. He was cleansing himself. He was freeing himself of worldly possessions. He was re-creating himself into a more powerful soul.

He was also depriving himself of all pleasure. He was pursuing goals that were unattainable. He was separating himself from his closest friends, those who loved him most.

I admire the spirit of the vegan, but I also see the sickness. Humans are messy and dirty. So is Mother Nature. We can't get away from that. We can't remove the pain and the hurt.

And Dave must have been so full of pain and hurt.

In some way he must have thought he could remove the suffering by becoming numb.

I feel guilty for admiring his journey now. Was I standing back and admiring what I wanted to see? Did I want to see something that really wasn't there? Was I missing what I should have seen.

A few weeks before Dave killed himself I ran into him at Berkeley Bowl. I told him I wanted to go to one of his raw-food potlucks. We talked for awhile and then exchanged emails. The potlucks happened once a month and one was coming up.

I didn't go. Sadly, there would be no chance to go to one with Dave again.

Just a few days before he died I saw him at a Farmer's market. I mentioned that I always saw him at food places. He made a sarcastic comment about him and food. Looking back, I can see now that he was drained, overwhelmed by it all. His battle was too much. His pain had not vanished, but instead, had grown far too immense.

How can the pursuit of good be so bad? How could his desire to become healthy actually kill him?

Goodbye Dave,

I hope your pain is gone. But I need you to know that so many people down here loved you. Ed and Adrian will have holes inside themselves forever. These are holes that will never heal. That's how much you were loved. You were loved for all your strengths and weaknesses. Both. You were loved for both.