I am now going to spend just a few days finishing up the pictures I took with my new Father’s Day camera in the San Francisco Bay Area. Then I promise we will move on to bigger and better and stranger things, although I still can’t say exactly what those things will be, because that is not the way my brain is structured.

Let’s talk about friends. Friends are a good thing to have. Even I have managed to make a few friends, and I am not easy to deal with. The best kind of friends are the ones who knew you when you were a kid, and still like you anyway. I am lucky to have a few of this type of friends that are still alive, not crazy, and not too boring. Growing up where and when we did, this is something of an accomplishment.

Chris and Andy grew up on the same street as me. Technically, they moved in a few years later, and were not there when I was a baby, but they were there during my formative years… (Oh, those crazy formative years. Remind me to tell you about them some day… at least the parts I can tell you about)…

Ahhhh. There are my friends. That is Andy on the left, beside his girl friend. Chris is the handsome guy on the right. That is not his wife sitting beside him. That is my mom. We are eating at the English pub that is very close to my mother’s house…

This pub is awesome. The fish and chips are great. The Boddington’s ale is excellent. The Shepard’s pie rocks. And there is a dart board, so you know it is authentic. There is even a play area full of toys for the little ones which is located right under the dart board. I admit that maybe they didn’t think that part through as well as they could have. But so far, I have never seen a child with a dart sticking out of their head, so it is all working out.

Chris is an auto mechanic. He has been one since right after he graduated from high school. We used to work at a car shop together, way back in the day, but as you know, I am all art-side-of-the-brain, so I am not really good with tools unless I am using them to carve a tiki or something. Chris is so good at it, he now runs a shop. He doesn’t own it, but he is the guy in charge. Here are a couple of pictures of Chris looking very in charge and professional…

See, he can use a computer to keep track of things, which is another thing I could never do. And he gets to sit at a real desk…

He is so good at fixing cars, than when I drive the 500 miles to the bay area, I always have him look at my car if it is making any funny noises or smells. This time he replaced my brake pads… whatever those are… and did a tune up. He even threw in a pair of new windshield wiper blades. He put them on himself. As long as he was bending over the hood of my car, I told him to do one of those sexy Playboy bunny poses, where they look over their shoulder and put a finger to their lips. I haven’t even seen a Playboy since I was a kid, but I am still convinced that beautiful women always take most of their cloths off and get into this pose whenever they work on a car…

Oh, yeah, baby! Chris is looking good. And you can clearly see the sign for his shop. So, free advertising. If you are ever in the bay area, look it up, and tell him Arthur sent you.

We can’t leave Andy out. He was kind enough to drive me around to take some of the pictures you have been looking at. He took me to one of our favorite hangouts from back in the day…

You guys used to hang out in a cemetery, you may well find yourself asking at this point? Well, of course we did. Think of it as a very big, very pretty park, with lots of trees, and fantastic views of the bay. And there were never crowds of people having picnics and getting in your way. And it was very close to where we lived. On top of all that, the residents never complained about the noise we made…

And there were lots of places to sit or lay down to rest in the shade, like this interesting tombstone made to look like a bed… get it, eternal resting place…

I told Andy that as long as he was laying there, he should try doing a sexy pose. He has known me long enough that this didn’t surprise him too much. He knows I have a weird sense of humor. But he didn’t really see the point, either. So I told him about Chris and the sexy pose he did, and Andy decided that he wasn’t going to be outdone…

I will leave it up to you to decide which of my friends pulled off a better sexy pose, but you must admit, it is nice to have friends that are willing to humor you in these sorts of situations.

Andy is a black belt at some kind of martial art, and works at some sort of computer job that is too complex for me to understand. And he, like Chris, is a really nice guy. And he is willing to put up with my shenanigans, so there you go. Chris met up with us when we were doing these shots, so I took a couple of pictures of them both at another of our favorite spots in the cemetery…

How nice is it that someone decided to make their headstone into a bench? Oh, we spent many a night when we were teenagers, drinking beer and… stuff… and singing Alice Cooper and Beatles songs on this bench. They are doing some landscaping, so the grass here is gone for now, but it is still a nice spot with a great view. And say what you will about hanging out in a cemetery, but if you ever bring a date to one, especially when those rare ground fogs I told you about in an earlier post are rolling through, you can bet that the girl is going to be staying very close to you. Believe it or not, this is where I took the girl who is now my wife, on our first real date. So don’t pretend you never learned anything from me.

Oh yes, it is good to have friends. Remind me, someday, to tell you more stories about the cemetery. I have thousands of them. There was this cave we fixed up, down in a hidden valley, and… oh, no, you will just have to wait till I get into the right mood.

One last picture to finish up this rambling rant about friends. You may remember the earlier post where Chris and Andy and I went out to see our friend Bryan Kehoe who was playing in a ZZ Top cover band. This post was from an earlier trip home, so you might have to go back a way to see it. But I did manage to hook up with Bryan while I was there this last time. My brother Sid and I met him at the Hotsy Totsy club, a little dive bar in Albany. Take the time to Google Bryan Kehoe. He is an interesting guy. He has been in tons of bands, including playing with Les Claypool of Primus, who did the theme song for the Southpark show. I know Les because I used to do stage bouncing for him when he was in a band called Blind Illusion. But look Kehoe up. He is a Bay Area institution, a gifted guitar player, and one crazy dude. He has been since high school and even back farther than that, now that I think about it…

My brother, Sid, is the one on the right, just to make that clear. Okay, see you soon, so we can finish this photo thing up and move on to something else.