san francisco

Quick little bartblogging while I’m on my way home. Friday night had a taste of the old glory days. Maybe it was AlexUA on the scene, or maybe it was just the first time I’d been out on the town in a long while, but it occurs to me that I’m only going to be young and pretty enough to run with the bulls for so long, and it may be advisable to make the most of it.

Anyway, the Mission these days is out of control. All the trends that were in place when I left have continued to expand exponentially. I hear the same about North Brooklyn (will see in a month or so). Not sure how I feel about all this, but it seems like… an opportunity at least.

I need a good BART image. There’s something about the “I’ve got 7 minutes to kill at the Embarcaderro station” post that really appeals to me.

Anyway, just came from a great little convo with the inestimable Dan Droller, who’s back out in SF from business school. Great to catch up. He seems to be doing well, and chatting it up with him makes the weight of my world seem a whole lot lighter.

On the other hand, I didn’t pee before entering the mass transit system. We’ll see how two pints of beer sit with me on the train ride home!

Rocking a little free underground internet here at the Embarcaderro. I got royally soaked riding down from the office at 10:30pm when I finally arranged my exodus. Such is life in the KoneZone of late.

It actually felt good to ride in the rain. Really good. It’s not ideal over the long haul, and I hope it clears up by tomorrow, but it’s been quite some time since I felt the spatter of cool spring water on my face; swishing down slick glinty city streets flickering with yellow orange sodium vapor light… It made me feel young at heart, free and easy, like projing on home to Brooklyn back in the day.

I used to be much more rugged and rough, much more obviously confident, risk-inclined. If my train went off the track I picked it up, picked it up, picked it up. Those were glory days. Not the glory days oh ye of the nostalgia police, but a set of days glorious and undeniable. Their memory is worth keeping alive, the better for their spirit to live again.

Well, I’m headed back down to SF for the week. I was planning to take off yesterday, but Saturday night the Hombre and I made a snap decision to go out to this Burning-man-influenced local rager, which was a lot of fun but didn’t exactly put me in a good mood to drive for six hours on Sunday.

I’ve been having a pretty good run of things of late, feeling more and more like a native and less and less like a shut-in tourist/refugee. It doesn’t hurt that I’ve been getting out of the house regularly. Gee, who would have thought.

This trip to the city should be interesting. After my summer experience of sublet-sampling, I came down from Black Rock City with an “Invest in Westhaven” todo item. That leaves the city an open question. I have to show my face around the office, and there’s plenty to enjoy on the metropolitan tip, but making the mental decision to call the HC home for at least another year puts a different spin on things.

Well, that’s really all I’ve got. “The future was wide open.”

Leaning out my window just now smoking a peta, I see a guy and a girl walking by holding hands, look like sorta-trendy sorta-“california” people, maybe the kind I don’t pay much attention to, but just under my window the girl says to the guy, “you make me happy.”

That’s all; silence and footsteps on the bookends.

It reads as the kind of unguarded, unprompted statement you make when you’re in a moment of liking someone.

Feels a bit intrusive, me spying this little interpersonal interaction, but it made me happy too.

Just click that and let it play.

The friends you keep up with over time are the ones that matter, and I always feel sorry for people who seem surprised when I tell them I live with a best friend who I’ve known since we were 14, and I get even older friends I’ve known since wee-boy childhood coming through touring with their bands and what have you. That whole scene.

We all reinvent ourselves; we all go through changes; for all the excessively individualistic ideology we grow up with about identity in America, I think it’s our connections in many ways define us as people. I’m proud to have history, maybe more loosely tied to my flesh-and-blood family than some, but rich with a pretty wonderful array of souls all around this great blue-green earth. My own world-wide-web. Ho ho ho.

I dunno; it feels like everyone is waiting for something. Sometimes it’s that undercurrent of doom — when will the other shoe finally drop? — and sometimes it’s just that fleeting, unprovable, but totally undeniably unshakably true feeling that there’s more to life than this. I most often feel like I’m waiting on revelations, for some kind of heavenly inspired moment of clarity or strike of lightning or burning bush to show me the way.

They do happen from time to time. Maybe you wake up in some strange girl’s bed and you don’t ever leave. Maybe you just saw her face and it made you a believer. Maybe it’s a speech you see, and then decide to join up with the campaign. Maybe it’s the desert sky or a city skyline and sunset. These moments come few and far between, but they do come, and the best the rest of us can really do is try and be ready.

There’s a bit I wrote in a performance piece about six years ago about being on the Edge that I’m remembering right now too:

There’s a certain point where your heart stops, literally and figuratively, where you die, both in the biological sense and the Shakespearian, where the divine membrane separating this world from the next reaches its point of maximum tension and, to borrow a phrase, you break on through to the other side.

And I don’t want to go back. I mean, who would? Fuck me if I don’t want to feel that feeling again and again and again - it doesn’t matter what gets you there: we all crave that ecstatic unconsciously beautiful moment, a moment defined by unity and coordination of motion. It’s never static: whether you’re threading obstacles at high speed, or dancing the dance from which all dances have come, or just lying still as a god and feeling the celestial clockwork spinning all around you… you are there, you are an irreplaceable part of what is happening, and you are undeniably alive.

Life isn’t just a series of climaxes — the holy waltz of contrasts can’t all be high-notes; everyone knows that — but there are these good and heady stretches of smooth-sailing speed that I wish I could stretch out better and longer and more often. Living free and easy with friends; having some kind of community or plan or something; a bigger-picture dreamland context and skating fast on smooth Zamboni glass. I miss those old monkey days.

My mom and I both share this feeling of always being out of place. I suppose we share it with a lot of people, being always constancly acutely in-between. Sometimes it’s a blessing — I make a pretty good living straddling gaps — but rootless independence has its price. It wears a body down making your own way day after day.

And it’s not to say that I’m really “on my own” ever. I’ve got friends and partners (and mom, like I said) and plenty of comrades too, but it’s a shifty underground personal kind of network. I treasure my people, but they’re few and far between, and a diverse bunch to boot. You never know where more of them might be at, and it’s not like we have our own scene or anything like that. The New Cultural Movement remains, for now, a clandestine affair.

Phiew! I started off wanting to write about how I was feeling kinda lonesome, swimming around in the City and wishing it was just me and my people and my fantasy lover back out in dreamland, and how that Old Crow Medicine Show tune was plucking at my heartstrings last night having dinner with my friend Kim back in Brokeland, looking at pictures of friends from New Zealand, etc. Somehow I got all diverted off into the revolution. Whaddya know.

I’ve made it down to my workaday summer outpost in the Dogpatch and my first home-away-from-home off in the Panhandle. Greeted by blue skies and sunshine. Initial city impressions:

• Wow there are a lot of pretty girls. On the streets, in cars (presumably bars) and freight elevators even.
• I’ve lost some of my nerve for fighting traffic on the bike. Those country roads and stationary machines have made me soft.
• Or maybe it’s that I haven’t really been riding all that much, because these hills are harder than I remember too.
• The living situation seems like it will work out great: nice unassuming roommate, wifi, extra-long twin bed (so my ankles don’t even hang off).
• The office hasn’t been progressing too much in terms of getting fixed up. It’s basically the same as it was last time I was here two months ago. That’s gonna change.

After last weekend’s outlaw mountain trip, I started re-re-reading Sometimes a Great Notion, which is probably one of my top 5 books, and have been slowly digesting the potential of having one foot in the city and one foot in the woods.

It intuitively feels connected to my existential crisis-of-meaning du jour, reconciling these seemingly contradictory aspects of my life. What I want is some kind of grand Hegelian synthesis: a future where my biodiesel hybrid 4×4 pickup carries me from Silicon Valley to the peaks of Trinity County in carbon-neutral style, and there’s someplace in-between called “home” where the dog stays while I’m down in the city.

Is that kind of thing really even possible? It feels like maybe… it also seems logically like a bacheloresque way to roll, all that movement, or at best (see point #1 above) a “girl in every port” type of situation; but the dream includes a family of course, which begs a huge and unanswerable sea of questions, variables out of my control, etc etc etc. Hrmmm.

For now I’m happy to be here, soaking up the ambient kinetic energy of San Francisco. It may be the rambler in me, but being on the move has put my mind at ease.