Last night as I grilled a flank steak on our little George Foreman grill I had this urge to fling knives into the air and bang metal spice shakers around the way they do when you’re sitting around the fire table and restaurants like Benihana.

I’m not sure if this flight of fancy was brought on by the feel of the grill heat on my face – I always sit at the end when we go to Japanese steakhouses so am closer to the heat source – or the sound of sizzling meat, or the fact that I was half-listening to back-to-back episodes of Top Chef while I was puttering in the kitchen, but there you are, or there I was, imagining myself wielding very sharp knives with the same melodramatic flair used by John Belushi in old SNL sketches when he did his Samurai (Whatever) sketches.

Speaking of early SNL, my mind is also living in the early seventies this week, as the part of my novel that I’m working on involves a baby conceived during the Summer of Love, a cafe, and a VW Bus, and it’s made me really wish that instead of sitting in my uber-suburban Texas tract house, I was, instead, sipping percolated coffee while toasting my hands near a bonfire on the beach, or sitting at Haight-Ashbury staple All You Knead, where I remember getting $4.50 spaghetti as late as 1988, when I was in college, and where the menu is a funky but somehow perfectly logical mix of organic, vegetarian, and classic diner.

This novel would be so much easier to write if I were IN San Francisco, not just remembering it.