Honestly it had been 4 months since I went out for the evening.
Last time I was out, sadly, I didn’t know the shutter on the Olympus 35 UC had failed. That probably happened the evening of December 13th, that lovely Gemini Full Moon, that lovely house party that made me also want a Philadelphia Row Home filled with love. There’s sadly 6 days of images I thought I got. There’s gratitude that I forced myself to bring three cameras.
The last night out was with the fullness of an old friends family. I’ve known Patrick & Amy for 21 years; thru their move to Baltimore 19 years ago, them marrying to the point of making their names a mash-up, to the birth of their two kids, their second home. Amy finished her graphic novel this weekend. I’m happy I’ve got two weeks to take that book in. That last night out was December 22nd, a bitingly cold Sunday in Baltimore but amazingly beautiful in the clarity that only bitter cold could provide. It was 29 degrees that night but my heart was able to keep me and others plenty close to 98.6.
I returned to the Bay Area to coldness. Not only was my 1920’s apartment long devoid of the radiators that provided its only heat source. But of warmth, of humanity, no matter how hard I try; having Sunday Dinners with the neighbors, petting all the dogs willing to meet me at the fence, tending to my strawberries, it ain’t been it, hasn’t for a long time. Humanity in a direct message asked me to come out and play two weekends ago.
I met Erica at a poetry reading in Philly 2 years ago. Again, a moment that spurred me to bring a trio of cameras as I ran out of frames by the time she started reading from Mahogany, a freshly released book of poetry that drew me in, drew tears out of me that I needed to let go of. While my elder care journey ended in my almost death, hers ended with her mom’s passing and a level of reverence I struggle to see finding in myself if I’m still alive to see either of my parents pass away.
(I know people hate when I point out that very morbid possibility).
The poems are weaved with pieces of The Supremes then Diana Ross’s discography, even my much beloved “Whisper You Love Me, Boy.” I struggle with many a creative identity. Other than what I consider some really rancid poetry I used to post on Facebook 15-17 years ago, I’ve never considered myself ‘a poet’ even if say, if I were look at friends, that would be the 2nd biggest clusterfuck of actual relationships I’ve found myself in besides car nerds.
Erica reached out to say she was having a birthday party. The invitation said something along the lines of dear one, find a little happiness again. There was a request also, to bring perhaps a 2 to 3 minute long poem to read.
To read…
To Read?
Eugh, to read….
There of course, as my tendency to commit in a surface way, was the undertow of trying to find an excuse out of obligation. I’ll say it here as I feel I’ve said it repeatedly that I really loathe having to ‘go out’ to socialize. The amount of preparation, effort, fear that I’ll say, wear, do the wrong thing. No matter how I may present as someone that has social graces, I’m always going to feel quite feral in casual social settings. My parents never really did it with beyond family. A lot of times when we did go out, say to Sizzler, I always cringed at how conspicuous we tended to be with our lack of social refinement even by chain restaurant standards.
It takes a lot of energy or a lot of handholding to get me out of the house on a Saturday night. DJing was only something I did with a number of those Saturday Nights because there was a financial incentive. I also need to challenge my commitment-phobic ways and keep my word. Erica wasn’t asking for anything other than presence and sharing a neglected artform of mine.
It was a bit of a blown kiss to Ted from halfway across the country. Had he not insisted on getting me out, even worrying about us eating dinner in time to make the reading, I wouldn’t even be stuck sorting through my emotions about feeling seen yet diving into the oceans of my anxiety about just showing up for a birthday party. This invitation was due to his divine intervention. I had never been good at having fun. Even when not around the catalyst, you find the courage to carry on activities and relationships others developed for you.
I told myself it was actually far cheaper to just go out and get a free dinner rather than sit at home another Saturday night and order DoorDash. I told myself to dress up in that new butter yellow leather jacket. Think of what combination of mid century you have in your closest screams Taurus season. Maybe make a date for yourself that no one ever would dare to. No one else really knows what your heart desires anyways. It would be a good thing not to hide yourself away, as you normally do.
I needed to make it a bit more special. Taking BART or a Lyft was just not gonna do. I looked up the Ferry schedule as I sat in my bath of lavender bubbles. As Dee Dee Sharp cooed “Wild” from the tape deck playing in the living room, I realized the privilege that, despite it all, you could still have a very cheap portion of evening on the water if I made it out of the tub, coiffed and dressed by 5pm. Something about the light drizzle and the slight fog of the afternoon had me in a dream state anyways. An extra layer of feeling like I was passing through veils, an extra layer of maybe this is a spell, somehow it’s time to transcend the hell I find myself in.
Something about the grey mist also washed away any delusions about choosing this divine way of moving from place to place felt less special than I thought it would. I was clearly overdressed as I walked down the Ferry Pier, facing people in seas of weatherproof gear as if it was a January downpour in Portland. It was balmy, nearly 60, my hair started to curl in delightful ways in the humidity. I couldn’t feel more alien, more gorgeously otherworldly as I boarded.
I normally only choose to ride the Ferry on the sunniest, warmest days where BART can be outright suffocating as an option. The Ferry is always a relief valve, 25 minutes that slow down the hectic hurry up and wait energy that the Bay Area feasts on constantly. It was different to come into San Francisco this time, fully being backed by the signature fog rather than atypical sunshine I experience more normally.
It’s interesting to see how the dimensionality of the landscape changes, backed by skies of Grey instead of skies of blue. Those hints of pastel that seem to permeate the majority of the cityscape lose their glitter. It’s a dull city that’s lucky to be perched on so many hills. In actuality it looks very much like a grey early 1990’s Pontiac interior, top trim level. If your parents owned a Bonneville SSEi you know what I’m talking about. Grey buttons everywhere. Overkill for route functions like turning the radio station or adjusting the heater. San Francisco, in its signature fog, seems complicated for no reason. Why does it insist on doing things in a very complicated way…
Does it know it’s killing itself?
I step off the boat, again a blast of color in the grey. I dodge a fleet of Waymos congregated by the Ferry building. It’s a short walk, perhaps a needed walk through the Embarcadero Center. The massive brutalist futurism fortress is the main obstacle between me and The Golden Sardine anyways. Embrace beasts as potential lovers. They are lonely too. Perhaps in the mutual neglect we’ll have each other all to ourselves.
I walk past the Osha Thai that’s next to Justin Hermann Plaza. I’m fascinated by how empty it is at 6pm on a Saturday night, perhaps only 500 steps from the Ferry Building. I didn’t even bother pulling on the door to see if it was actually open. I was confused by some of the lighting saying yes, the dearth of humanity within saying no. I’m not down on the Embarcadero on weekdays, but the vibe definitely was giving graveyard on this Saturday night. I’m not shy about enjoying time among the dead however, so I climbed some of the whimsy in the brutal, spiral fountain staircases that whirl you up to different promenades throughout the whole complex.
Complex it is given its that infamous Hyatt, various retail and office spaces, some Condos, a Safeway and a movie theater. It’s one of those designed for all urban demands life center concepts from the 1960’s. Somehow it seems to have never had a good relationship with organic life. That seems to be plenty of what’s happened to ‘developed’ San Francisco in the last 60 years. This is a place that thinks parameters enable proliferation of community, when those boundaries only create antiseptic spaces devoid of vibrant life.
I’m in trouble at work right now because I asked someone still dear to me when he’d leave the graveyard. The upper tone of that statement was literally about our offices being the office building you catch in the cemetery scene of Vertigo. I know the undertow of my inquiry was looking as deep as the direct eye contact I was making when I said it. There’s plenty one could say about how one’s creative output can be a death rattle, hell I hope this juxtaposition between landscape and my words right now aren’t the same tune.
I made it to Clay. Time to leave the graveyard.
I wound the thin barrier between actual still alive Chinese community in Chinatown bumping up against the phallic plunder of skyscrapers in the Financial district. Walk a little more northwest and the dichotomy shifts to the faux Italian-European urban Disneyland district that’s North Beach. Art used to be created in the apartments here, not as much today. The creativity has been priced out, yet still the burble of a Saturday night wafts through the air as if there were still Beats in the cafes at street level. I don’t know whether to fully indulge my cynicism or let some of the magic waft over me.
I’m a cheap date. The Ferry was $9. I bought this roll of Portra back in November. There’s enough cheesy outposts to a past you still appreciate to document, for you never know when all of this camp will disappear into the Borg Cube that’s San Francisco’s future. It’s important to me to remember that I am who I am was based in some realities, not what worries me as ever encroaching fantasies.
Painted signs,
neon lights, handmade ravioli…
Still here despite the odds, but god have the prices gone up.
I was early. I add anxiety to any Saturday night by notoriously not running on colored people time. I spin the block one more time to make sure there’s nothing I’m missing or not memorializing. I arrive early to my fears and suspicions. I beeline for the first Black person I see and make the best of it. We both discussed feeling alien, outside of the place that we have called home for the majority (or in her case, all of) our lives. I say how much at my age I’m over it. She says in her relative youth she’s still fighting for it. I honestly wish her the best, and believe she’ll get what she wants.
I’m dying to be anywhere else. I miss being honest as I could be about my dreams and dilemmas as I was at the holiday party thrown by Bryan & Marks neighbors. All the queers stayed a little later than the crowds, there was delight in the eyes of my audience that I was dreaming of moving. There was a bittersweet understanding that, similar to Oakland’s crisis of identity because of the futility of resisting assimilation into San Francisco, I worried that Baltimore was suffering the same fate of its proximity to D.C.
Philadelphia stands on her own, has a little bit more room to breathe, to feel a little less of the death grip of empire on the landscape. Odd in its role as a foundational city to this said colonial project. I’m curious about that thread, and want to be surprised. I’m tired of being punished about being right about everything I already know, what I’ve already been told.
I waited til last, hoping Erica wouldn’t notice that I hadn’t gone yet. There was clearly not enough drugs or booze flowing as I was the last name goaded to go. I complained, I pulled out the mensch routine full of shrugged shoulders and more sharpness as I let the consonants leap from behind my teeth, the vowels slightly bellowed. A transition from the Newscaster voice to the stand up comedian’s voice. I’m a good clown, I always want to make the audience laugh before I might teeter too close to pulling their tears out with my own.
I had come across one of the more later, hopefully less treacly poems that I had floating around from 5 or 6 years ago when I was clearly in another Saturday night where I spent in. I found it a few months ago, have reposted variants, but expanded it from my diary. To feel more real, I read from the diary version. If I were to be real, really me, I had to pull from the page and encounter my own frenetic pull between cursive and print. I still redacted where the words I wrote told too much of myself but it went a little lot like this:
Because you drank coffee at 9:15 pm
and you never drink coffee after 2 pm…….
you’re awake at 2:33 am, hoping for some drag
or drain
of energy to leave your body…but you lie there and notice how stiff your body is…
in that way that intimacy…sleeping side by side or snuggled up against someone releases. Because you’re stoic but also soft as clay
and sometimes it takes another pair of hands to mold you into a new work of art.
You miss and long for the subtle warmth of the last hands
you trusted to do that all the while reasoning with caffeinated fuel in the silence and darkness that they couldn’t…
.weren’t able to do that all the time
the only reason they could was your ability to softly mold them,
see them as clay that could be transformed into art.
So you weep a little,
hope that by doing a little diary entry
in the middle of the night for eyes to see,
because you write out your emotions
so they don’t work with societally acceptable drugs
to keep you circling
when your body just wants rest for the next day you’ll be living.
And that you soften yourself like you always do…
and keep your hands warm to keep on molding your world.
Hopefully closing my eyes 10 minutes later works wonders for the next 5 hours and beyond.
I loved and hated every moment of it. I was told I was great, that it was raw, and decidedly I am. I made it out of the confession booth that’s my apartment. I sang something that might have been a bit of a gospel to a choir. I’m leaving home in a better shape than I thought I would. It was easy to give hugs and kisses goodnight.
Lindsey and I talked about how difficult it is to navigate the world right now. She said how community is saving her right now. Same, girl, same. I’m just sad it’s not as robust on either side of the Bay now. I tell jokes about how spooky parking garages are near midnight to once again avoid the heartbreak that I’m not long for this place. There’s faces I might have to leave behind. Maybe I should have stopped by that spot for a tarot reading, but I already know what my own deck has told me.
