You might think that I learned from a very good teacher in one of the schools I attended. I learned some things in school; however, I learned writing from Herb Caen. He wrote a society column for the San Francisco Chronicle for sixty years. He died in the late 1990s. If I were on a bus or a streetcar, or riding the subway system, I read his column from a copy of the paper I found in an empty seat. I did not subscribe to the paper. One of his favorite citizens was a lawyer: He was killed in a two-car traffic accident in the Broadway area. Caen wrote quite a few columns following up on the story; Herb Caen resented that one of his favorite human beings was killed in a common traffic accident in a touristy district. He was mad at the driver of the other vehicle.

Another story: A sixteen year old young man leaned against a wall in the Broadway district—you could go and see a striptease show along that street. He had an expensive ring on his finger, but it was clear that he had been cast aside by someone prominent in the department store trade in the city. The man in the department store trade, with his name on at least one store in the city, had put this sixteen year old out on the street after some level of companionship—sex, sugar daddy stuff, things like that, I guess. What the hell do I know? I just read the society column.

When Herb Caen talked about a bakery in Berkeley that sold soft chocolate cookies with hard bits of crushed-up candy cane inside, I went there and tried them. It turns out, I do not like hard, mint-flavored bits in cookies—just the aesthetic and mouth feel—but the taste was good. In another instance, a woman from the Philippines had a window-front business in the Mission District: She sold potato chips fresh out of a big oil vat. I walked by and looked at them one day. I thought the potato chips were thick; I wanted them to be thin and delicate. I did not try them.

Another moment he captured: He was on Nob Hill, where some of the fine hotels are. He saw an old friend from a distance. He thought he looked ruddy and healthy. As they got closer, it turned out, the ruddy look on his face was the result of ruptured blood vessels on his nose and face, which Caen took to be from too much consumption of the strong liquor.

Melvin Belli was a famous lawyer in the city. He had long wanted to visit Tibet. He admired the religion there and the people. He made his visit, but was disappointed: The sanitary habits of the people there did not meet his expectations. They did not bathe much, and they smelled bad, at least the ones he met.

Well, that is how I learned how to write. Engage your audience, entertain them, tell them something—even if it is only that you are slightly paranoid when you buy your favorite food from a display case in the food-service basement of a nearby department store (near your newspaper’s office), and you must handle the filthy lucre the cashier returns to you—all those germs from all those people who have handled it before.

Yes, he got a little uppity when he became a syndicated columnist: A Palm Springs newspaper decided to carry him. He alienated some of his gay fans by taking on a slightly conservative bent. I am either not homosexual, or I just don’t care. Entertain me, entertain me—just do it.

I remember at the age of thirty three, standing near the main train station in Nagoya, Japan—something like the third largest city in the country. I remembered being up in a building across from the train station. I looked up at the place. I thought about how restaurants in dense city centers in Japan are often nestled up within buildings; they need not be at the sidewalk level. I thought: Good luck doing that in America.

Sometimes the space these establishments occupy spans two different buildings, so that the floors do not exactly match—at the transition, there might be a six or eight inch height difference, and you have to put in a ramp or a very noticeable, yellow-striped step. I thought how odd that was—an American pizza chain restaurant, say five floors up, that crossed two buildings like that and with a difference in the floors like that.

I was searching for my identity in those days, and I added the rather simple thought: Yes, you will be a writer; you will write about stuff like that. Whenever after that I returned to the Nagoya train station, I stood for a minute on that spot and thought nearly the same thoughts. Over time it became a deep pondering that included this: How the hell do you get there?

…three-dot journalism into the sunset.