My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

I’m living a common life in the midst of extraordinary change on the waterfront of San Francisco Bay. Construction crews with Igloo coolers sit on the sidewalk, hardhats still on, the Latino crew brings a microwave and runs an extension cord for their tortillas, and the former small time warehouse district grows up condos and biotech research office parks like chips stack up on the baccarat table in Vegas.

It’s a gamble, it’s a short term sure thing for someone somewhere, and it’s sure thing time right now or else these guys wouldn’t be eating lunch on the dock of the bay, just watching the tide roll away. Money is here now and it feels good to be a common man, one of the little guys, making it actually happen.

A pawn gets to charge first into the battle and if life is gonna suck as long as you live, charging into battle makes a lot of sense. If it can end fast, falling off an unsecured balcony and the employer pays your family 60,000 dollars U.S. for your life, you done good kid – we put a sticker on the rear window of the Civic to honor your name.

I’m at the pawn level. Driving my junk truck around. I have a 14 foot rowboat – traded my old Hard Worker pick up for it. Just put it in the water, which brought me down to the waterfront. I was rowing back to my slip at the slack tide from a boat club bar and it was dusk and I was under the piers trying to stay out of the pushy wind coming down the channel.

San Francisco piers are 300 yards long, 100 yards wide, cement pilings every 8 feet in all directions. The damp concrete roof is inches above you and it’s dark under there, and silent. The gentle lapping of water is all you hear, but the echo makes it hard to pinpoint the shore.

Giants’ stadium is not far at all, but you have entered another world. Tug boats are moored up and seals bob in the water in the sun, but your row boat has to be no wider than four feet to get between the perimeter pilings. At close to high tide you must lay flat to the dinghy seat to get past plumbing strung underneath the pier.

Underneath and protected from the wind the water is still and flat. A tentacle could rise from the water and the ripples would be unmolested as they rolled towards the bow.

Under here, you remember you are not the only predator on earth. Too often in a city we think only of other ethnicities as predators, our fellow humans that don’t look just like us are the only danger. But on a tippy little rowboat with an old wine cork for a plug, in the darkness and quiet with just a square of light on the other side guiding you, you remember. The unknown is a monster. There is so much to fear. Unhuman things.

But you get to the other side. No problem…gill-netters, nuclear waste from the shipyard down the line, toxic rain and general over fishing pretty much guarantee nothing can live in this little shoreline habitat. The water itself is the killer – the small fish come with government mercury warnings.

But it was scary. And you feel good to have been afraid, and safe on the other side, tied up and walking to your car.

The completed condos seem to be furnished but empty, the shoreline view reflected on windows with pulled blinds. You, a common man, feel better than the incredibly wealthy that own on the edge of an icon. But wait, up on the top floor you see a man waving his arms. He’s air conducting an orchestra. Probably a symphony. Something by Mahler. Hundreds of musicians in his mind. His back is to the window, and to the view of the Oakland hills. As you walk by you realize your sense of importance probably isn’t even on the same chart as his. Other people both think they are, and are, doing more than you.

It is too much for the mind to understand, the disparity of resources, so the drink you buy your pal at the bar has the weight of an island given by a king to a general for a well fought battle. And we all keep fighting.