Streaky is how you Americans like it (and bacon).

Dharma's birthday shindig was a blur of tinkling Pimms, three chocolate cakes on three birthday noses, and sequential portraits done while sporting an oppressive blue sombrero. It's funny how I've gotten used to an hour across London not being too far now atop a big red bus from Bermondsey to Shepherd's Bush. Going west!

I've been on a rekindled lovefest for Cobra beers, so bear with me as I will be bringing my lager-friend to all picnics and barbecues I'm invited to in the next month or so.

My little room, such good light for so much of the day!

I'm now a Hackney denizen, after an epic day of watching our neo-Nazi Romanian mover-men (swastika tattoo with eagle atop on his calf, I shit you not) schlep things down eighty-two steps. Great day for moving house since everyone was at someone else's flat or more likely, at the pub, jostling for ogle space as Germany beats Argentina in the World cup.

Missing Julia already! Though I'm sure she's amused and I'm still ashamed that I called dibs on the ottery nazi.



Though I'm already in love with the new flat, and as soon as I see the terrace overlooking Homerton, I know I'll be spending a lot of time there just reading, writing, laying on my back staring at the sky. My little basil bush happily lives here.

It's strange being in the hip neighborhood since Hackney is the Outer Mission of London, and I used to be in the Oakland equivalent in Bermondsey.

I'm unpacked by the next day since I still don't own much, my little travelin' prayer flags flapping away in the warm breezes of mid-July. I've gotten so used to my bed touching three out of four walls in my room in Bermondsey that suddenly having double the space is a rush to the head. I forgot how nice it is to just read on the cool wooden floor on a early morning before work.

Nights, dozens of insects in varying sizes but all flying zoom into our rooms, orbiting the lights until we suck them all into the vacuum. Who knows what they'll do in there?

The Gun, the pub on our corner

Barely a street away, there's a massive Turkish supermarket with the biggest onions I've ever seen, halal butcher, greengrocers, and then the ubiquitous Tesco Metro hulking in the middle.



My first night, we're cheering along with the locals in a tiny place literally next door down called The Gun. And then it's vaporised ice cream on our terrace as the purple sun sets over London and our candles. So yeah, it's like we had a night inside the Anthropologie catalog. We swing back into things with a barbecue for two soon enough, so we carry on.

My walk to work is now a perfect 3.1 miles (5k!) each way, and I'm turning at The Blind Beggar (apparently the Salvation Army started here), passing Hurwundeki, until finally Jack the Ripper's hangout.

Ice cream and candles after Germany triumphs.

Nina's kimbap made my day.

There's a evening where I walk past the jalebi and samosa vendors, weaving through crowds of people feeling sorry for myself, and by the time I pass the canal, I'm kinda homesick and a Englishwoman gives me a sympathetic half-shrug when we make eye contact. And then Lana del Rey blares from someone's car as I walk by the giant poster of the lizard goddess, and I have a big grin on my face in the remaining mile through Grandmother's house in Cambridge Heath to home.

First meal in the new flat, so of course I had to make a curry.

I spend a day working away in a big beam of sunlight that just slowly sweeps across the room until it's time to start up the chicken coconut curry. I think I've made a curry for myself once a week since coming to London, a few curries actually fitting into a distinct country's flavors, but mostly a comforting love child of Thailand, India, and Hong Kong.

Some turn into coriander tapanade to be eaten with darkest rye breads. Sonnenblumenbrot suffices too. And hey, one of these weekly curries won 2nd place in a contest, so apparently I'm honing currymaking as my Care Bear skill.

I wasn't lying about el Sombrero Opresivo.

Jess and I spent an hour slowly making the coals for the faux braai, shielded by bamboo mats, the fire starters igniting in very carcinogenic ways as we tuck more and more matches and stories into the coal. Sausages bubbling in rich juices, crispy oozy halloumi that breaks my dairy vows, and then onion velvet and blackened sweet potatoes nested in the coals. It gets chilly as the day crinkles up in pleats on the horizon, and there are even some sausages for a fatty fry-up in the morning with Algerian bread to soak it all up.

We blaze up some coals again on Friday night as the storm clouds slowly drift west over us. Boerewors makes it a proper braai, I suppose. Violet the dachshuahua licks my nipple as our candles sizzle in the drizzle.

Breakfast on the terrace!

The Ghanaian mum in the next middle is nagging again, and someone gives me the thumbs up for  the mellow lady tunes I'm piping into the space between us. Play some Window by The Album Leaf one morning when you're just lazing around on a Saturday morning. That's a lovely ass feeling, boys n' girls. Also Sweet Disposition by The Temper Trap. Wake up to that, strap on your walking shoes, and go explore your city.

Lehnert accuses me of doublespeak when I talk about how being "fine" sounds to me like being "upset." It's sometimes fun to think of work (in the same way little kids think about superhero lives they'd lead), where we're just delaying 1984 from merging with reality, and it's looking hopeless, but there just might be salvation in next week's glossy issue, just around the corner.

Fireworks going off in Victoria Park! No internet until end of the month = bingewatching Downton Abbey and lots of catching up on my book a week.

How many types of sparkles are there?

Summer vacation doesn't exist for us. The thought throws me for a loop when I discover it each year (in the repetitive Colombus' discovery of America sense apparently).There aren't three months of year where you spend a lot of time crawling around the scrubby woods or just on perpetual loafing about. June blew by me this week, and that's half down, folks. Those warnings about winter being a thing in England will come to pass, and I do own a jacket or two.

Until then I'm liable to go wander Notting Hill in a duffel coat and fisherman's hat until a posh English family adopts me. If it worked for Paddington Bear, so why not me? I can check cocktail party in this posh posh area code off my list now that I've had butlers topping off my mojito soundlessly while little bloblettes of moreish food float around in platters (Moreish = British for a food so tasty that you want more of it).

The joke was on me later when I realised there was no alcohol at all in the mojitos. It's like a cleanse, guys. Lemonade and mint, I swear by it, totally meant to do that.

Worksnack: Some fried Algerian pastry.

I wrote a guest post on the Norwegian oil fund supporting drone warfare, and it got picked up on a minor blog of Norway's main media group. I'll take the minor wins when they come rolling in, and it was fun to check on the comments as Norwegians calmly debated the issue. I expected the compulsive trolling and name-calling that usually hangs out in Internet social spaces, but maybe it's more of an American thing.

#sometimesreadthecomments

After calming overcoming our first car stalling mid-road (there was a pub fortunately), we set up tents outside the village of Radnage in Buckinghamshire (within shouting distance of a pub). Yes, my first camping trip in England happened, and on a field that probably had orphans snip the grass into the perfect height for bare feet

There was a boiled treacle pudding, rice & chilli, with plenty of tea to start us off and ease it down. We then ducked into the Crown to wind down the evening with some local ale until we heard the rolling thunder. The water started pelting down, and we all finished the dregs of our pints before ducking out. Our tents had barely been battened down when the skies just let all hang down.

For the next four hours, it rained and rained and somewhere out there, a small white cat with spectacles mused about the desire to buy a boat. My new dinosaur-green sleeping bag was only £25 and it gave me all the mummy loving I needed to ignore the known world washing away.

We wormed out of the tent in the morning, and no one seemed to have washed away. Sodden grass steamed away into mist as I dodged giant flying bugs in the temperature cycling showers.

Fresh grass smells and allergies blew around us as we drove through leafy love tunnels toward a train festival. Enthusiastic Englishmen swarmed at us to show off their anorakin' merit badges, and I learn enough about train operation and restoration to earn a masters' degree on the spot.

We hop on a train to nowhere, and there's a mechanical computer.

We wander the wet trees, everything dripping, shades of honeydew and sunlight dapple. There's some kind of giant ornate mausoleum to a local family that doubles as a toast to bad taste, and we sit facing horizons of field and pasture, with a straight Roman road blazing through the middle. 

Lunch is served atop a sunny blanket and there is a celebration of British pork products, with Scotch eggs, pork pies, sausage rolls, and some gouda to just get us into another food group. 

Porkified sufficiently, I'm tanning in the sun sipping my first Ribena. The purple smell of liquid blackcurrant now superimpose warm English countryside afternoons onto my childhood memories of steamy Hong Kong streets.

We chase away dragonflies and make our way to the Hellfire Caves, where some poor servant girl got tricked into hooking up with a local nobleman. The noble stallion turned out to be three local boys who ended up stoning her to death. Yay, happy ending (and this is why you ask for face pics, boys). 

The caves themselves are a steep pebbley walk through damp tunnels that make up this ancient frat house. The river Styx at the bottom should have oozed more, something like this.

Cold pints during golden hour take us to another pub for a dinner of fish n' chips. It's naptime weather even when we leave for the leisurely hike back to camp, rustling through knee-high fields of golden grass. Birds of prey dive and dive on toasty thermals, and none of the nettle along the path seems to realize I'm not wearing long pants.

We pop into the pub and interrupt a 40th birthday, before marbles rumble in an elaborate twist on jenga.

The week before I left for home in San Francisco, it all zipped by in a blur of meetings, with a stop to consume extensive quantities of Ethiopian food with Zorah and Nina.

Oh Shoreditch, I can see why people like you so much.

Above, Nina is channeling our collective excitement for the vegan stews we are about to bathe in, just off Brick Lane. Sad that she won't be greeting me with perky noises at work, and she was sweet enough to bring me japchae on her last day at work.

She wins all the points. Excellent noodles for snaffing on while strolling back across Tower Bridge.

Stroll turned into a hustle once I got into the delusion that I would somehow be able to pack and move from Bermondsey to Hackney in two hours, and then pack more suitcases for my flight back to the States.

Julia talked me down from the edge, and I only packed for home.

And of course London looked like its gorgeous self when I left for my flight. 23 hours, and 4 in Charlotte with some passable BBQ.

But then I was home, and within a day, San Francisco turns during Pride into the magic gay kingdom that it really is underneath that fog and tech-hate. There's certainly ample sorcery involved when David and I walked right into Tartine with no line to snag some morning buns. No line again at Clare's Deli around the corner (I know, lesser magicks). 

Did Burning Man happen early this year?

Armed to the teeth with paper bags filled with carbs, we pick our way through the crowds in Dolores Park, waved off frantically to the side by the Wachowski sister as she tried to film a scene involving hot gay boys.

We still take off our shirts because honey badger don't what now. We've reached the finish line for the year and there is no more time to go to Equinox, everybody. Even if they have eucalyptus towels and the best q-tips.

San Francisco is home, and there is basically endless cuddling, which I am totally okay with. 

Two of my favorite people, and this picture would be in a scrapbook if I did that kind o' thing.

There's trivia night with Bebe greeting our London-representing table, and we make it onto the podium of red, white, and blue questions. People are getting married left and right, and I'm pretty excited about these first sprouts of wedding announcements. 

And then I'm on a sailboat with Lincoln's fellow MoFo legal eaglets, freezing in the sea spray while having a Lagunitas, and we're circling the Golden Gate Bridge before mountains of shrimp, oysters, and crab cakes fall upon us with a frenzy.

East Bay is where I'm going to be a cranky old person one day, I've decided, and Berkeley just keeps giving me pangs each time I go back. I will certainly have a peach tree, berry bushes, a goat. 

The Meresman clan serves up a perfect backyard barbecue of grilled spicy peppers fresh from the garden, Moroccan chicken and beans, warm buttermilk cakes topped with berries. A baby with the cutest ringlets eats a nectarine like a cheery beaver with its front teeth, and I'm going to have more bourbon whipped cream, yes please.

We roll our contented selves to Chris' nook just off campus, and after anchoring at 4.0 hill in the shadow of emo tree and the Campanile, we're perched on Indian Rock, staring up at purple veils and pink hazes floating down on the strangely organic rock because of the clots of people that swarmed all over. The three of us clamber like demented crabs towards the summit, where I'd once hugged another boy more than two years ago now.

As the fireworks light up the urban moonscape, people whoop and cheer, and we continue gazing where our view is unobstructed. We spend the whole time staring at the wrong patch of cotton candy sky, fireworks peripheral as it rained silver glitter wherever we looked. The rock is endless sojourning as we try to avoid firefly orbits around the Fountain at The Circle, the little bears at its base sheltered from the shiny stuff twinkling down.

We rewind our paths across campus, and we're just three mewling dudes in their late twenties rolling on wet grass and squinting at stars in the drizzle, hurting nothing and bothering no one. We make it back before starting an epic slumber party. Why and when did slumber parties stop being thing? 

Jackfruit atop oven-fresh brownies, while Lana del Rey is a reptile deity who is very interested in me, and I haven't been able to stop looping her at work yet.

♫ Down on the West Coast I get this feeling

Like it all could happen that's why I'm leaving

You for the moment, you for the moment, Boy Blue, yeah, you ♫ 

The week was over before I knew it, and this leaving was harder than the first time. There wasn't the distraction of needing to figure out the basics in London, and the full brunt of how much I'd miss the people who love me at home just bodyslammed me at the airport. 

Some things are more important than I would have thought four months ago, and I don't want to miss out on what I know makes me happy. I'm closing in on what I think I want, and I'm just anxious about making good choices at each of these itty bitty life junctions. 

Please do bear with me.

Until then, we're holding down the fort with persistence, spiderwebbing, and a little luck.

And where does Clay Aiken live?