Pride Weekend almost killed me. It started with a text urging me out to Pink Saturday, I smoked a hearty bowl, got dressed, and waited for the 33 at the Children's hospital with some guy in a marijuana themed doo-rag. The driver looked like a fat Morgan Freeman, and was telling a loud and BLACK BLACK BLACK passenger about how he loved the night shift, because he could just get a little high and drrrive. Marijuana obviously meant a lot to all of us, and the bus got smaller.
Too small, in fact, because at Geary we are raided by femmy high schoolers and their Avril tie wearing gay companions. Swigging from the plastic bottles that said Mountain Dew but smelled spiked I was immediately crowded upon by people representative of the reason I thought it was a shitty idea to go to this dance in the first place. I left my seat and went to the back of the bus at the next stop, which left me across from some twee Asian kid who did everything he did so as not to be noticed, but clearly wanted to exchange smiles. The guy in front of me used to be -one second, as I'm typing this at the school library, somebody keeps saying "It's GENO!", and I'm thinking of Dexy's- somebody I served coffee to at Whole Foods, a quiet Britisher with bad taste in cafes. Geno woman is insisting that "she gave it to me", and I am no longer thinking of Dexy's. The youth on that bus kept erupting in their early alcohol experience, the normal politic of high school amplified by raging emotions and chemistries and public exposure. They were the reason I stayed on the bus after the stop of the dance, with it's simplistic bass fast enough for MDMA, young enough to make the cops wear pink wigs.
I instead got beer and tacos. They say anorexics do what they do because they can't accept adult sexuality, and the girl who lured me out there seems to be on the verge of overcoming that. Which is to say, she was comfortable with adult sexuality, but only when it was the conclusion of a series of errors and non-decisions on her part that left her standing naked in somebody else's room. I am sniffing the white powder again, and it is everything that metaphor suggested it would be, except it doesn't make me a total asshole two hours after the fact. She woke up at seven to participate in the Pride parade, and I waited for my mom to give me her usual post-church call and meal. I found her bracelet next to my bed this morning, an archaeologist to my own civilization. The condom wrappers still litter my room to give it that spunky, jazzy smell I know and love as my own. One of the Cockettes used to bake cum bread, the "secret" ingredient being his own ejaculation. The Cockettes are a shining example of pride done right, pride for the right reasons.
My mom did eventually call, and we saw Mongol. The geezers and I in a very hot theater, tensions raised to twenty, such that one of them says to no one in particular "Man the cinematography is just breathtaking". I used twenty minutes of the movie for a private shit, film related muzak pumping me through the occasion, overlooked by the face of Warren Beatty on a film poster barely visible through the crack of the stall. Hi, Warren Beatty, I will be done in a second.
I didn't smoke that evening because my throat was at this point primarily just a sensor for pain, as it was abused by all the fucking and drinking and smoking and night walking I put it through. As a result, my dreams were remembered. San Francisco was starting some kind of Dub institution, a minaret of reggae and rasta preaching. A lot of specific people were involved, but mostly I just remember a kind of Sumerian temple, blood red, with beats. I feel like I know Marcus Garvey personally.
Even if the person at the transcendental spirituality bookstore made fun of me for asking if she had books about him. They totally did, despite her scuffaw and overt reminder that I was in the transcendental spirituality bookstore.
Jeru the Damaja is friends with Rasta Powers, and so am I.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Dead Clothes
Nick Waterhouse and I were on the 71 at the same time. Wildly different experiences and spacially inconcievable differences, sure, but it was the same bus. He, black on the face limited to the ray bans and in no way a product of growth or age or experience. He, dapper to the point of being imprisoned by so many jazzy blue note lines and prints, suits not to ask the reason why. In the middle of our venn diagram would probably be that we were both hung over, it being Saturday, but I was enjoying it as just another stewy internal expression, not carrying myself like a mannequin.
I guarantee he did not notice me. Joe Payne looked up to this cooltown fascist when they all lived at state, and hipsters' avenue was a wider and more visible thoroughfare. I later followed his girlfriend briefly on the internet, drawn in by her Marin Headlands origins, Feist-y brown hair, and sense that she was made of dingy fabrics in maroon, evergreen, and eggshell. I think she is the reason I see the shorties and the fatties and the inconcievably mismatched in the counterculture western boots. She has a younger sister who Tyler Johnson is probably fucking at this very moment, more power to him, and I don't feel like I need to meet this people.
The only time Nick and I did that he was laying down his Saturday night routine of affection overdrive on my entirely too self-aware roomate as I drank and called him foolish pride. He was over the table, on the side of his lips, and with foot magnetism teddy rubs. The ray bans were transparent this time, because it was night. I wonder if he really needs them. I mean, medically.
I was at a bar last night with a fake internet company paying for my drinks, presumably on credit since the only revenue so far has come from one of the founder's clicking repeatedly on banner ads. I did a lot of them, drinks and pees, before the bar was crowded enough to warrent a doorman. Alpha testing music critics were there, one with a spinal tap t-shirt, one whose novelty in being female is sort of description enough for all assembled, and one who had a beard and a bag of falafel to share. They had burritos and bubbles, blabber about recent releases and rival resumes. The Cure causes a bit of shaking.
One of the co-founders is reported to have said that she is a lawyers' daughter from small town Ohio. She says despite this, she feels as though she is the smartest person she has ever met, a real Nick Waterhouse in personal experience. I say that this is a ridiculous thing to say, that it seems to me more born of the first idea, that of being the daughter of a lawyer in small town America and therefore constatntly being in a position of having to personally justify the treatment she recieved, the privledges she has had, and the impediments she has never faced. We stop talking, and she stops asking me if I want more rounds.
Then one of the rock fan dudes who I spoke like four sentences with about Guitar Wolf pays for Ben, he, and I to take one of two cabs which will take our party to the Hayes Valley. I smoke the cab riders out on the corner and think that marijuana will never be legal because it has been forever if you have money. Inside the bar they have no PBR but I'm handed a Pacifico, and it is good. The DJ plays some Radio Michael Jackson and the white energy is as throbbing as it is flaccid.
I met David Sedaris two nights ago, and last night realized that he and Dan Savage are two different people. I knew something was up when they looked totally different, but I had just assumed time works differently in the Pacific Northwest. The person who invited me to the signing asked him to sign her chest, and wanted me to agree with her that this was an unreasonable refusal on his part. I did not. In fact, I would go so far as to say the way she monopolized our face time with the man with her confessions of affection and theories of cosmic sameness were downright embarresing, even wtihout the chest remark. But I have hair like David Sedaris's boyfriend, and the looks he gave me were equal part an acknowledgment of that and an expression of pity. He signed all three of the books, doodled a dinasour, depricated the dinasour he had just drawn, and seemed all in all like a nice, totally not Savage Love authoring man.
There is a rifle sitting in the living room of 817F Quarry Road, a pot smoker sleeping directly above, a guy described only as a lover of Dominos Pizza next to him North, and a silent Asian toilet seat cacaophonist next to him North. If there wasn't so much alcohol everywhere all the time, it'd be kinda funny, but instead I feel like one of us is not going to live to see the end of the lease. We are the Balkans of the Presidio Military Family housing, memories of a recent divorce being the only driving force in our culture and action. Custody of unwanted children the border states being pawned about by the Great Powers. The hipster culture makes people hear Beruit and tell everyone they're really into Balkan music.
People are racecar drivers, a vessel for sloganeering, advertisements, and flameouts. It doesn't matter what you wear, just as long as you are there. But they keep moving, really really fast.
I guarantee he did not notice me. Joe Payne looked up to this cooltown fascist when they all lived at state, and hipsters' avenue was a wider and more visible thoroughfare. I later followed his girlfriend briefly on the internet, drawn in by her Marin Headlands origins, Feist-y brown hair, and sense that she was made of dingy fabrics in maroon, evergreen, and eggshell. I think she is the reason I see the shorties and the fatties and the inconcievably mismatched in the counterculture western boots. She has a younger sister who Tyler Johnson is probably fucking at this very moment, more power to him, and I don't feel like I need to meet this people.
The only time Nick and I did that he was laying down his Saturday night routine of affection overdrive on my entirely too self-aware roomate as I drank and called him foolish pride. He was over the table, on the side of his lips, and with foot magnetism teddy rubs. The ray bans were transparent this time, because it was night. I wonder if he really needs them. I mean, medically.
I was at a bar last night with a fake internet company paying for my drinks, presumably on credit since the only revenue so far has come from one of the founder's clicking repeatedly on banner ads. I did a lot of them, drinks and pees, before the bar was crowded enough to warrent a doorman. Alpha testing music critics were there, one with a spinal tap t-shirt, one whose novelty in being female is sort of description enough for all assembled, and one who had a beard and a bag of falafel to share. They had burritos and bubbles, blabber about recent releases and rival resumes. The Cure causes a bit of shaking.
One of the co-founders is reported to have said that she is a lawyers' daughter from small town Ohio. She says despite this, she feels as though she is the smartest person she has ever met, a real Nick Waterhouse in personal experience. I say that this is a ridiculous thing to say, that it seems to me more born of the first idea, that of being the daughter of a lawyer in small town America and therefore constatntly being in a position of having to personally justify the treatment she recieved, the privledges she has had, and the impediments she has never faced. We stop talking, and she stops asking me if I want more rounds.
Then one of the rock fan dudes who I spoke like four sentences with about Guitar Wolf pays for Ben, he, and I to take one of two cabs which will take our party to the Hayes Valley. I smoke the cab riders out on the corner and think that marijuana will never be legal because it has been forever if you have money. Inside the bar they have no PBR but I'm handed a Pacifico, and it is good. The DJ plays some Radio Michael Jackson and the white energy is as throbbing as it is flaccid.
I met David Sedaris two nights ago, and last night realized that he and Dan Savage are two different people. I knew something was up when they looked totally different, but I had just assumed time works differently in the Pacific Northwest. The person who invited me to the signing asked him to sign her chest, and wanted me to agree with her that this was an unreasonable refusal on his part. I did not. In fact, I would go so far as to say the way she monopolized our face time with the man with her confessions of affection and theories of cosmic sameness were downright embarresing, even wtihout the chest remark. But I have hair like David Sedaris's boyfriend, and the looks he gave me were equal part an acknowledgment of that and an expression of pity. He signed all three of the books, doodled a dinasour, depricated the dinasour he had just drawn, and seemed all in all like a nice, totally not Savage Love authoring man.
There is a rifle sitting in the living room of 817F Quarry Road, a pot smoker sleeping directly above, a guy described only as a lover of Dominos Pizza next to him North, and a silent Asian toilet seat cacaophonist next to him North. If there wasn't so much alcohol everywhere all the time, it'd be kinda funny, but instead I feel like one of us is not going to live to see the end of the lease. We are the Balkans of the Presidio Military Family housing, memories of a recent divorce being the only driving force in our culture and action. Custody of unwanted children the border states being pawned about by the Great Powers. The hipster culture makes people hear Beruit and tell everyone they're really into Balkan music.
People are racecar drivers, a vessel for sloganeering, advertisements, and flameouts. It doesn't matter what you wear, just as long as you are there. But they keep moving, really really fast.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Don't Friend Request Strangers
Corey Sleazemore found me on the facebook. I think he sent blanket invites to all who are friends with Blow Up. His personal information is just a long list of mp3 remix hypemachine bands. I feel like the genre is validated by the Missy and Joy Division mashup "Love Will Freak Us" but is still mostly a vehicle for young people to gain a sense of exclusivity.
I did not accept or deny the friend request.
James Joyce's Araby is not something I read closely, but I got the jist of it. I am telling Bren Sutter in a car about all of these supposed feelings I've been having, labored interpretations of post-sexual affection, not even in my own words but in a second rate Elephant Six song. She claims to get it, beetroot faced flattery, and I feel love for love.
I never so much as touched her. I was not interested in knowing her even. I was just pushing for triumph and esteem. I get sick thinking about it, my transcription of fulfillment onto a vessel completely unprepared and unable to provide it, but I guess I'm not the only person to be so stupid.
Hence, Araby.
Now I would like to tell you if you would let me about the chai I drank today. There are shit tons of Indian buffets in the city, some virtuous, some perilous. The one I tried today was at the end of the N line, and also serves Pizza. I assumed it was only able to survive because of the beach blanket Babylonians, but apparently the pizza is good enough that yelpers travel for it.
Most of the helpings were unremarkable. The Tikka had that vague starchy aftertaste like the secret ingredient is a KRAFT mac n' cheese packet, which would also explain how a drop of the shit was able to permanently stain my shoelace. One of the curries had hard boiled eggs in it, and it was unclear when the trays were last empty. I would not have any desire to ever return to this place again, were it not for the chai being so fan fucking tastic.
It's as though they commissioned the same people who make the flavor compounds that revive frozen McDonald's food and told them to work on the perfect clovesauce. Carefully measured drips of the stuff from an eyedropper are placed into a cauldron of angel milk, which is then heated and cooled six times for no fucking reason. After this stage, the black tea is added and the resulting compound is placed inside a chamber of supreme containment and thermal retention, or a thermos.
Then I drink it, and I can only think to text message friends and family about the miracle liquid. And I do, the only person in the goddamn restaurant.
Last night I saw Ramon Sender (he was the guy I posted the youtube video on here of with the breathing exercises) and his amazing hat. He was part of a panel discussion at the library about the San Francisco Tape Music Center. The songs they played as part of the demonstration could have been totally off the wall ballsy crazy if it were 1963 and I had never heard of Pierre Henry or John Cage or music with the electrons now, but it is not 1963, and most of the stuff sounded righteous in it's own distortion and disregard for song structure.
Cryptic people are no genius, but they did bring toys, including a synthesizer that had a panel of red lights on the front and looked at least as interactive as a vending machine. It was an hour before the event was to begin, and the old beardos were trying to align their looping tapes, I stood in the corner and tried learning stoic.
Online dating websites are weird, and fairly uncharted cultural territory when it comes to the kind of idle class analysis those raised on Ira Glass demand of life. I think I am prone to mini-Arabys on the Internet, except I'm older now and have a kind of resigned, cynical, adult sexuality that doesn't allow me to dream.
I have ten more minutes on this library computer. I like my young body but I wish I wasn't such an old soul. I wish I wasn't alone typing articulations of mistakes I made when I was seventeen and thinking about the next smoke, shit, and sit down. I'll be a friend to get a friend, if I have to. Do whatever it takes to retain people I know in the pocket, so I can't see that I'm falling.
X's and O's would be nice but I honestly don't jones for it anymore. It's like cocaine in that I'm sure if I had some, just remembered how good it felt, I'd do what it takes to get a hold of it, but it's gone from my system entirely. Smoke, shit, sit down.
I think I was a lover. I certainly think the bride is beautiful in that video.
I did not accept or deny the friend request.
James Joyce's Araby is not something I read closely, but I got the jist of it. I am telling Bren Sutter in a car about all of these supposed feelings I've been having, labored interpretations of post-sexual affection, not even in my own words but in a second rate Elephant Six song. She claims to get it, beetroot faced flattery, and I feel love for love.
I never so much as touched her. I was not interested in knowing her even. I was just pushing for triumph and esteem. I get sick thinking about it, my transcription of fulfillment onto a vessel completely unprepared and unable to provide it, but I guess I'm not the only person to be so stupid.
Hence, Araby.
Now I would like to tell you if you would let me about the chai I drank today. There are shit tons of Indian buffets in the city, some virtuous, some perilous. The one I tried today was at the end of the N line, and also serves Pizza. I assumed it was only able to survive because of the beach blanket Babylonians, but apparently the pizza is good enough that yelpers travel for it.
Most of the helpings were unremarkable. The Tikka had that vague starchy aftertaste like the secret ingredient is a KRAFT mac n' cheese packet, which would also explain how a drop of the shit was able to permanently stain my shoelace. One of the curries had hard boiled eggs in it, and it was unclear when the trays were last empty. I would not have any desire to ever return to this place again, were it not for the chai being so fan fucking tastic.
It's as though they commissioned the same people who make the flavor compounds that revive frozen McDonald's food and told them to work on the perfect clovesauce. Carefully measured drips of the stuff from an eyedropper are placed into a cauldron of angel milk, which is then heated and cooled six times for no fucking reason. After this stage, the black tea is added and the resulting compound is placed inside a chamber of supreme containment and thermal retention, or a thermos.
Then I drink it, and I can only think to text message friends and family about the miracle liquid. And I do, the only person in the goddamn restaurant.
Last night I saw Ramon Sender (he was the guy I posted the youtube video on here of with the breathing exercises) and his amazing hat. He was part of a panel discussion at the library about the San Francisco Tape Music Center. The songs they played as part of the demonstration could have been totally off the wall ballsy crazy if it were 1963 and I had never heard of Pierre Henry or John Cage or music with the electrons now, but it is not 1963, and most of the stuff sounded righteous in it's own distortion and disregard for song structure.
Cryptic people are no genius, but they did bring toys, including a synthesizer that had a panel of red lights on the front and looked at least as interactive as a vending machine. It was an hour before the event was to begin, and the old beardos were trying to align their looping tapes, I stood in the corner and tried learning stoic.
Online dating websites are weird, and fairly uncharted cultural territory when it comes to the kind of idle class analysis those raised on Ira Glass demand of life. I think I am prone to mini-Arabys on the Internet, except I'm older now and have a kind of resigned, cynical, adult sexuality that doesn't allow me to dream.
I have ten more minutes on this library computer. I like my young body but I wish I wasn't such an old soul. I wish I wasn't alone typing articulations of mistakes I made when I was seventeen and thinking about the next smoke, shit, and sit down. I'll be a friend to get a friend, if I have to. Do whatever it takes to retain people I know in the pocket, so I can't see that I'm falling.
X's and O's would be nice but I honestly don't jones for it anymore. It's like cocaine in that I'm sure if I had some, just remembered how good it felt, I'd do what it takes to get a hold of it, but it's gone from my system entirely. Smoke, shit, sit down.
I think I was a lover. I certainly think the bride is beautiful in that video.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Inspired by actual witnessed events
THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES (FUCK TOM WOLFE)
The big one finally hit San Francisco on the evening of June 30, 2008. For those affected, it came as a shock (how else earthquakes could come I am not sure) completely unforeseen. Well, I guess that's not entirely true, there were pink haired muralists and cyber punks who would later claim that they foresaw the whole thing in a Mayan Codex, and the evangelists who always had it out for the homosexuals and the hippies would later claim God had told them it was to happen, but for the rest of us it was quite surprising. People died while applying the knowledge acquired from PSAs that told them to cover their necks, hide under doorways, and stay in their cars. The bridges both collapsed and the BART tunnel flooded, filling the lungs of rush hour commuters with a salty and immediate death. There were no centennials still alive to compare the happening to 1906, but based on an understanding of the calamities as presented on youtube, the destruction seemed comparable.
I was celebrating the end of an era that began with my waking up that morning, and was now ending, eons of bullshit later, with a neatly packed bowl. From where I was sitting in the Eucalyptus grove, the sunset had become backwards, with the light all coming from the city to my East, suggesting the sun was a decided Orientalist. No sooner had I sparked my California Medicine did the bam began. The forest has a certain violence to it on calm days, with the tops of trees swaying into one another and sounding like a Scottish log throwing competition. But this cacophony suggested uprooting, this earth was throwing up and I wondered what it was I had just smoked and giants tumbled. The sunset righted itself immediately, the East went black and I still held it in my lungs. "Oh shit", the THC said using my lips, "Oh shit".
Electricity was gone from the Peninsula, and in its place North San Francisco tried putting the sense of whimsy that kept New York afloat after the 2003 blackout. Spontaneous brotherhood is less suited for situations with collapsed buildings and widespread devastation however, and the "it's just like camping" attitude only lasted as long as it took the invalids to find their way to Sacramento Street. People felt their resources limited, and most squatted on their lots of incomplete rubble, guarding whatever water or food they had purchased in the less demanding world of a few hours ago.
The police and fire department was on the scene with as many officers as they had on duty that evening, but since the rest of the force found the East and South Bay more affordable than San Francisco, most were unable to reach the scene. Army helicopters flew around the plumes of smoke now visible from a once again illuminated downtown, picking people up from the last rooftops but carefully excluding media from their ranks, there would be no images of bloated black corpses floating in the bay.
Men with guns stood at the tops of hills, from which the scale of the devastation could be taken in and their former residences defended. Makeshift barriers of car chasis and other props from the apocalypse sprang up like coffee shops in a gentrifying neighborhood. It was almost as much of a shock as the quake, seeing all of those thick rimmed glasses looking down the sight of rifles and into the eyes of neighbors. I didn't think white San Francisco owned so many guns, hidden away for the moment society drops its civilized pretenses.
I ran away from the forest as the trees slapped the ground and the earth itself seemed to rise up in protest against the injustices visited upon it by our fair city. It's a good thing I was so high, the explorer in me just happy to have finally achieved history just by being there. It was about a half mile from the forest to the Presidio gate, and I made the trip in about a half minute. Animals were freaked the fuck out, in so much as I had trouble distinguishing between them and my neighbors, all shrieking, all scared.
Presidio Heights had fallen, the faux French style apparently not seismically counter effective. The one house still standing had a fake brick pattern to its exterior, ridiculous because brick structures are the most likely to fall in the event of an earthquake, meaning this was clearly a lie house. I wondered if the occupants were home, somebody emerged from a port-a-potty halfway down the block, though exposed piping made the whole area feel like a toilet. I knocked on the door with the same instinctual calmness that prevented that person from just shitting in the street, and was answered by another guy from behind.
“Fuck”, he said.
I looked over my shoulder and a middle aged man dressed in clean white shorts and a dress shirt was holding a leash and through it attached to a Pomeranian. He had on a backpack which seemed like it hadn’t been worn in years, the messenger bag being the briefcase of the 21st century.
“Yeah, holy shit, right?” I said with some giggles, happy still to be stoned.
He was walking North, to where a placard outside of the Presidio Golf Course displays historical pictures of refugee camps set up on the green following the 1906 quake. The wind was picking up, and a great deal of soot was climbing the Berkeley hills and obscuring the ugliness. I looked around at the block before knocking again, Corinthian pillars blasted away as if by Turkish cannon. No answer. The man and his Pomeranian were gone, the day worker’s port-a-potties like bizzaro blue English phone booths, all off the line.
We would later learn that it was in the first hour that most of the Western Addition and Mission district were incinerated. Shotgun houses at the neck of their occupants, an underground trigger, fire. The sunset had emptied and its residents were huddled around themselves on the beach, tide rising slowly, ethnically sorted like a reversal of Brown V. Topeka. Downtown was leveled, the top story occupants falling in less than a second into a bloody mesh of panhandlers, crack addicts, and modern furniture. The Haight Ashbury emptied into Buena Vista Park, much to the vocalized frustration of the crusty hippies whose sleeping bags were discovered and crowded. The media reported looting in Bayview, The Visitacion Valley, Excelsior, and everywhere else sensation is married to racial overtones. Accusations of wrongdoing were premature and unheard in the city, as everything combustible was still burning.
North seemed to be the popular direction for people to move in, maybe because people didn’t realize the bridges were down, or maybe because people assumed that the Marina and Pacific Heights would receive aid sooner than their forgotten block or neighborhood could hope to. Relief came mostly in the form of fog, obscuring the damage and cooling overexerted survivors. People didn’t sleep, or if they did, it was to prove to themselves that it had all been a dream.
I scoped out what I could of the wound situation from the eerily deserted block of Cherry street where the house still stood. The hospital at the end of the street had fallen, the NO SMOKING HOSPITAL ZONE now a BBQ of human flesh and spoiled bedpads. There was no urgency to anything, I wasn’t hungry or thirsty and had no intention of finding out if those I knew were still alive, just because I couldn’t imagine what that process would feel like. In 28 Days Later, the flyers posted around London for Missing People would soon become defictionalized, I figured, so what was the rush? Besides, I had no MS Paint, and never really thought my handwriting legible. I went around the house, each side prominently displayed a sign for FOX ALARM SYSTEM, but there were was no evidence of foxes or systems. I had a THC moment and decided I didn’t know what I was really doing there, what I was doing without school tomorrow, and ended up nesting with some now exposed wardrobe, burying myself in the silky Boutique of dirty free undergarments.
When I woke up the street was once again alive, the smell once again of ocean air. Skinny people dressed for the Marin Outdoors were sticking together, some with guns, some with provisions, and some with distressed appearances getting the full panoramic view of exactly how much was lost. Downtown was still on fire, but the air traffic was more frequent and we could see little Durnkirks to the North and West. My block was staying put. We had too much to lose, in our statues of Aphrodite, immobile but still valuable sports cars, and calorically empty imported foods. I watched as they watched through binoculars the situation at Mason and Geary, where the public housing used to stand, and there were now young mothers tethered to the rubble by their immobile children. We looked to make sure they didn’t come this way, the New California Market being our collapsed pantry and nobody else’s. We weren’t sure how long this thing would last, if we were going to be able to return here, and we felt at least entitled to our own survival.
I went back into the park to my old room. Before the collapse, weekdays meant packs of dogs pawing through the Presidio like they were born of wolves, as the professional dog walkers shun leashes and come with dozens. Now there were people, not joggers, but people. The youngest among them were still plugged into their ipods, but you could tell their parents were finally embarrassed for their offspring’s insistence on unreality. They had with them the things one would need to live, but their clothing still spoke of values of exclusion, of identity, of plenty. I walked North with them until I got to my apartment, where my things had been shuffled in with 70’s construction materials and plastic crap the Chinese Empire and children’s imaginations were built upon. I didn’t know what if anything to take, my favorite rags are not warm enough.
The dogs were here still but they had leashes. Some even had clothes. I sorted the destruction that was at least half mine, giving me something to do and to think about as this exodus happened around me. Injured people, sad people, dog people. There would be room on the boats for them all. My neighbors had been military men, family men, proud dog owners. They were gone, heroically volunteering alongside Sean Penn and the organization of Jimmy Carter, saving people save a limb or two, following the noses and instincts of the dogs. I was hungry. No Indian buffet or Dim Summery would be cooking today, but I smelled pork bun. I climbed the junk pile, and could see in my neighbor’s lot a contained fire. Around it sat a Chinese family, guarding shamefully their action. I jumped down and they heard me, speaking in Chinese to one another. My neighbor’s dog was dead, pieces of it in their hands and over the fire and in my nose.
“That’s disgusting”, said a young white refugee, noticing because of my interest what lunchmeat was being enjoyed. Soon more people were looking over, and the Chinese family stood up and started walking West.
“That could have been my dog, you asshole!”
“Yeah, fuck you guys!”
They hurried their pace, veterinary school specimens in hand, as the frustrated and recently homeless mob started to rush them. Like ants on molasses the crowd engulfed the family and beat the meat from their hands and body and face. We loved that dog. We understood that dog’s language, at the very least, and for it to have survived an earthquake only to be eaten by people was simply appalling inhumanity. We couldn’t understand what had just happened to us, but we were moral people, not the type to hurt a defenseless animal. No matter what else happened to us now, at least we maintained our dignity.
The big one finally hit San Francisco on the evening of June 30, 2008. For those affected, it came as a shock (how else earthquakes could come I am not sure) completely unforeseen. Well, I guess that's not entirely true, there were pink haired muralists and cyber punks who would later claim that they foresaw the whole thing in a Mayan Codex, and the evangelists who always had it out for the homosexuals and the hippies would later claim God had told them it was to happen, but for the rest of us it was quite surprising. People died while applying the knowledge acquired from PSAs that told them to cover their necks, hide under doorways, and stay in their cars. The bridges both collapsed and the BART tunnel flooded, filling the lungs of rush hour commuters with a salty and immediate death. There were no centennials still alive to compare the happening to 1906, but based on an understanding of the calamities as presented on youtube, the destruction seemed comparable.
I was celebrating the end of an era that began with my waking up that morning, and was now ending, eons of bullshit later, with a neatly packed bowl. From where I was sitting in the Eucalyptus grove, the sunset had become backwards, with the light all coming from the city to my East, suggesting the sun was a decided Orientalist. No sooner had I sparked my California Medicine did the bam began. The forest has a certain violence to it on calm days, with the tops of trees swaying into one another and sounding like a Scottish log throwing competition. But this cacophony suggested uprooting, this earth was throwing up and I wondered what it was I had just smoked and giants tumbled. The sunset righted itself immediately, the East went black and I still held it in my lungs. "Oh shit", the THC said using my lips, "Oh shit".
Electricity was gone from the Peninsula, and in its place North San Francisco tried putting the sense of whimsy that kept New York afloat after the 2003 blackout. Spontaneous brotherhood is less suited for situations with collapsed buildings and widespread devastation however, and the "it's just like camping" attitude only lasted as long as it took the invalids to find their way to Sacramento Street. People felt their resources limited, and most squatted on their lots of incomplete rubble, guarding whatever water or food they had purchased in the less demanding world of a few hours ago.
The police and fire department was on the scene with as many officers as they had on duty that evening, but since the rest of the force found the East and South Bay more affordable than San Francisco, most were unable to reach the scene. Army helicopters flew around the plumes of smoke now visible from a once again illuminated downtown, picking people up from the last rooftops but carefully excluding media from their ranks, there would be no images of bloated black corpses floating in the bay.
Men with guns stood at the tops of hills, from which the scale of the devastation could be taken in and their former residences defended. Makeshift barriers of car chasis and other props from the apocalypse sprang up like coffee shops in a gentrifying neighborhood. It was almost as much of a shock as the quake, seeing all of those thick rimmed glasses looking down the sight of rifles and into the eyes of neighbors. I didn't think white San Francisco owned so many guns, hidden away for the moment society drops its civilized pretenses.
I ran away from the forest as the trees slapped the ground and the earth itself seemed to rise up in protest against the injustices visited upon it by our fair city. It's a good thing I was so high, the explorer in me just happy to have finally achieved history just by being there. It was about a half mile from the forest to the Presidio gate, and I made the trip in about a half minute. Animals were freaked the fuck out, in so much as I had trouble distinguishing between them and my neighbors, all shrieking, all scared.
Presidio Heights had fallen, the faux French style apparently not seismically counter effective. The one house still standing had a fake brick pattern to its exterior, ridiculous because brick structures are the most likely to fall in the event of an earthquake, meaning this was clearly a lie house. I wondered if the occupants were home, somebody emerged from a port-a-potty halfway down the block, though exposed piping made the whole area feel like a toilet. I knocked on the door with the same instinctual calmness that prevented that person from just shitting in the street, and was answered by another guy from behind.
“Fuck”, he said.
I looked over my shoulder and a middle aged man dressed in clean white shorts and a dress shirt was holding a leash and through it attached to a Pomeranian. He had on a backpack which seemed like it hadn’t been worn in years, the messenger bag being the briefcase of the 21st century.
“Yeah, holy shit, right?” I said with some giggles, happy still to be stoned.
He was walking North, to where a placard outside of the Presidio Golf Course displays historical pictures of refugee camps set up on the green following the 1906 quake. The wind was picking up, and a great deal of soot was climbing the Berkeley hills and obscuring the ugliness. I looked around at the block before knocking again, Corinthian pillars blasted away as if by Turkish cannon. No answer. The man and his Pomeranian were gone, the day worker’s port-a-potties like bizzaro blue English phone booths, all off the line.
We would later learn that it was in the first hour that most of the Western Addition and Mission district were incinerated. Shotgun houses at the neck of their occupants, an underground trigger, fire. The sunset had emptied and its residents were huddled around themselves on the beach, tide rising slowly, ethnically sorted like a reversal of Brown V. Topeka. Downtown was leveled, the top story occupants falling in less than a second into a bloody mesh of panhandlers, crack addicts, and modern furniture. The Haight Ashbury emptied into Buena Vista Park, much to the vocalized frustration of the crusty hippies whose sleeping bags were discovered and crowded. The media reported looting in Bayview, The Visitacion Valley, Excelsior, and everywhere else sensation is married to racial overtones. Accusations of wrongdoing were premature and unheard in the city, as everything combustible was still burning.
North seemed to be the popular direction for people to move in, maybe because people didn’t realize the bridges were down, or maybe because people assumed that the Marina and Pacific Heights would receive aid sooner than their forgotten block or neighborhood could hope to. Relief came mostly in the form of fog, obscuring the damage and cooling overexerted survivors. People didn’t sleep, or if they did, it was to prove to themselves that it had all been a dream.
I scoped out what I could of the wound situation from the eerily deserted block of Cherry street where the house still stood. The hospital at the end of the street had fallen, the NO SMOKING HOSPITAL ZONE now a BBQ of human flesh and spoiled bedpads. There was no urgency to anything, I wasn’t hungry or thirsty and had no intention of finding out if those I knew were still alive, just because I couldn’t imagine what that process would feel like. In 28 Days Later, the flyers posted around London for Missing People would soon become defictionalized, I figured, so what was the rush? Besides, I had no MS Paint, and never really thought my handwriting legible. I went around the house, each side prominently displayed a sign for FOX ALARM SYSTEM, but there were was no evidence of foxes or systems. I had a THC moment and decided I didn’t know what I was really doing there, what I was doing without school tomorrow, and ended up nesting with some now exposed wardrobe, burying myself in the silky Boutique of dirty free undergarments.
When I woke up the street was once again alive, the smell once again of ocean air. Skinny people dressed for the Marin Outdoors were sticking together, some with guns, some with provisions, and some with distressed appearances getting the full panoramic view of exactly how much was lost. Downtown was still on fire, but the air traffic was more frequent and we could see little Durnkirks to the North and West. My block was staying put. We had too much to lose, in our statues of Aphrodite, immobile but still valuable sports cars, and calorically empty imported foods. I watched as they watched through binoculars the situation at Mason and Geary, where the public housing used to stand, and there were now young mothers tethered to the rubble by their immobile children. We looked to make sure they didn’t come this way, the New California Market being our collapsed pantry and nobody else’s. We weren’t sure how long this thing would last, if we were going to be able to return here, and we felt at least entitled to our own survival.
I went back into the park to my old room. Before the collapse, weekdays meant packs of dogs pawing through the Presidio like they were born of wolves, as the professional dog walkers shun leashes and come with dozens. Now there were people, not joggers, but people. The youngest among them were still plugged into their ipods, but you could tell their parents were finally embarrassed for their offspring’s insistence on unreality. They had with them the things one would need to live, but their clothing still spoke of values of exclusion, of identity, of plenty. I walked North with them until I got to my apartment, where my things had been shuffled in with 70’s construction materials and plastic crap the Chinese Empire and children’s imaginations were built upon. I didn’t know what if anything to take, my favorite rags are not warm enough.
The dogs were here still but they had leashes. Some even had clothes. I sorted the destruction that was at least half mine, giving me something to do and to think about as this exodus happened around me. Injured people, sad people, dog people. There would be room on the boats for them all. My neighbors had been military men, family men, proud dog owners. They were gone, heroically volunteering alongside Sean Penn and the organization of Jimmy Carter, saving people save a limb or two, following the noses and instincts of the dogs. I was hungry. No Indian buffet or Dim Summery would be cooking today, but I smelled pork bun. I climbed the junk pile, and could see in my neighbor’s lot a contained fire. Around it sat a Chinese family, guarding shamefully their action. I jumped down and they heard me, speaking in Chinese to one another. My neighbor’s dog was dead, pieces of it in their hands and over the fire and in my nose.
“That’s disgusting”, said a young white refugee, noticing because of my interest what lunchmeat was being enjoyed. Soon more people were looking over, and the Chinese family stood up and started walking West.
“That could have been my dog, you asshole!”
“Yeah, fuck you guys!”
They hurried their pace, veterinary school specimens in hand, as the frustrated and recently homeless mob started to rush them. Like ants on molasses the crowd engulfed the family and beat the meat from their hands and body and face. We loved that dog. We understood that dog’s language, at the very least, and for it to have survived an earthquake only to be eaten by people was simply appalling inhumanity. We couldn’t understand what had just happened to us, but we were moral people, not the type to hurt a defenseless animal. No matter what else happened to us now, at least we maintained our dignity.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Benin Urban Groove Compilation
I was wrong about the Stern Grove show, delightfully wrong. I took my time in getting over there, taking the 6 Bus into the clouds and getting off at the same stop as a young woman who seemed convinced that my intention was to rape her. She was not entirely wrong, and I followed her up some stairs which had been given a street sign, and then reassuringly turned in the opposite direction once we got to the top.
There was a park with North Face wearing people and their dogs. I walked past them, past a playground that wasn't loaded with signs saying Kids Only and Don't Come Round Here After Dark and into a collection of bay trees and old cypress. The trees held a strange fruit, computer chairs (because the dot coms burst) and muni benches (because I just got off the 6) held together and to the tree by nailed planks at random angles. I bent my way into the Muni Bench, saturating my ass with Eucalyptus oil and fog residue, and I sparked a bowl. It was then I noticed there was trash everywhere.
The tree with the chairs faces out on the Sunset, in one of the hills near Noriega street where the elder Bush kicked some ass and there are also pastel colored houses. I took a bus down the hill, got on the 28 route and immediately studied my busmates to see which of them was going to this music scene. There were a lot of likely contenders, but then I also felt that way about the 6. I can convince myself that you are not who you say you are through your clothes and mannerisms. There is very little about my reality that I would say is objectively true.
The walk down to the grove was lined with opportunistic kids, legally hustling donuts and vitamin water. Fucking kill me now if I'm ever buying vitamin water, unless the proceeds go to a young hustler's ego. The rhythms were familiar and slow and Afro centric, the angle of the walkway steep. It's a free concert in the park, but many people are working there with stickers and barriers and other civilizing elements, so that we don't ever think we're just dancing in the streets. Seu Jorge either has some crazy Archestra of voodoo accomplices, or I am seeing one of the sons of Fela Kuti.
And indeed I am. Although the father may have complained about Nepotism as being a problem in his Nigeria, apparently when it comes to music the concept is not so bad. He plays Suffering and Smiling, and the injured rasta in front of me raises his staff and drinks from a conspicuously empty clear water bottle. It is, as James Baldwin says, the very cup of trembling. Where Fela would have been backed by maybe a dozen background singer wives, the son was more modest and had only two or three. I heard a group of hipsters behind me, one of them saying unconvincingly that "his father is... One of my favorites", as if to dismiss what we were being a part of today. And maybe a year ago I would have agreed with that sentiment.
But this music is not western music, and the emphasis is not on the songwriting prowess or encrypted symbolism. The emphasis is on the event, the captivating rhythm, the audience's participation, and the dancing. Mr Kuti is just a small fraction of what is going on, and that he is not original when he covers his fathers songs is irrelevant, nothing in our lives will be original and we're always just coming back to the same themes of life, triumph, and death, because that is all we have. I dance like I don't have a messenger bag on, swinging my hair like it had it's own percussion, and fade into a mass greater than myself.
I left Stern Grove feeling healthy like I didn't need food to live, only sincerity. The boys hustling the donuts still had dozens left, apparently they misread the crowd, but people don't buy a dozen protein bars at a time. I made my way to 24th street and struggled to finish a burrito. The 33 took me home, and I read the Richard Brautigan short story anthology "Revenge of the Lawn", laughing a lot and attracting some book reading young woman to sit next to me and decidedly look in all but my direction. I tried to prop the pages so she could see, read the fictionalized accounts of diffused casual sex between San Francisco strangers, but it was not enough, and she got off the bus near her house.
As usual, I was the last person off of the 33, and walking through Laurel Heights I heard a fence straddling semi-hipster describe to his decidedly non-hipster walking companion about a video he saw where it started with a pond, zoomed out to focus on our galaxy, and then it zoomed in all the way on a single cell, and we notice that it too looks like a galaxy. I am familiar with this footage, computer generated as it is. The pond always seemed lovely, I think it was in the Netherlands.
There was a park with North Face wearing people and their dogs. I walked past them, past a playground that wasn't loaded with signs saying Kids Only and Don't Come Round Here After Dark and into a collection of bay trees and old cypress. The trees held a strange fruit, computer chairs (because the dot coms burst) and muni benches (because I just got off the 6) held together and to the tree by nailed planks at random angles. I bent my way into the Muni Bench, saturating my ass with Eucalyptus oil and fog residue, and I sparked a bowl. It was then I noticed there was trash everywhere.
The tree with the chairs faces out on the Sunset, in one of the hills near Noriega street where the elder Bush kicked some ass and there are also pastel colored houses. I took a bus down the hill, got on the 28 route and immediately studied my busmates to see which of them was going to this music scene. There were a lot of likely contenders, but then I also felt that way about the 6. I can convince myself that you are not who you say you are through your clothes and mannerisms. There is very little about my reality that I would say is objectively true.
The walk down to the grove was lined with opportunistic kids, legally hustling donuts and vitamin water. Fucking kill me now if I'm ever buying vitamin water, unless the proceeds go to a young hustler's ego. The rhythms were familiar and slow and Afro centric, the angle of the walkway steep. It's a free concert in the park, but many people are working there with stickers and barriers and other civilizing elements, so that we don't ever think we're just dancing in the streets. Seu Jorge either has some crazy Archestra of voodoo accomplices, or I am seeing one of the sons of Fela Kuti.
And indeed I am. Although the father may have complained about Nepotism as being a problem in his Nigeria, apparently when it comes to music the concept is not so bad. He plays Suffering and Smiling, and the injured rasta in front of me raises his staff and drinks from a conspicuously empty clear water bottle. It is, as James Baldwin says, the very cup of trembling. Where Fela would have been backed by maybe a dozen background singer wives, the son was more modest and had only two or three. I heard a group of hipsters behind me, one of them saying unconvincingly that "his father is... One of my favorites", as if to dismiss what we were being a part of today. And maybe a year ago I would have agreed with that sentiment.
But this music is not western music, and the emphasis is not on the songwriting prowess or encrypted symbolism. The emphasis is on the event, the captivating rhythm, the audience's participation, and the dancing. Mr Kuti is just a small fraction of what is going on, and that he is not original when he covers his fathers songs is irrelevant, nothing in our lives will be original and we're always just coming back to the same themes of life, triumph, and death, because that is all we have. I dance like I don't have a messenger bag on, swinging my hair like it had it's own percussion, and fade into a mass greater than myself.
I left Stern Grove feeling healthy like I didn't need food to live, only sincerity. The boys hustling the donuts still had dozens left, apparently they misread the crowd, but people don't buy a dozen protein bars at a time. I made my way to 24th street and struggled to finish a burrito. The 33 took me home, and I read the Richard Brautigan short story anthology "Revenge of the Lawn", laughing a lot and attracting some book reading young woman to sit next to me and decidedly look in all but my direction. I tried to prop the pages so she could see, read the fictionalized accounts of diffused casual sex between San Francisco strangers, but it was not enough, and she got off the bus near her house.
As usual, I was the last person off of the 33, and walking through Laurel Heights I heard a fence straddling semi-hipster describe to his decidedly non-hipster walking companion about a video he saw where it started with a pond, zoomed out to focus on our galaxy, and then it zoomed in all the way on a single cell, and we notice that it too looks like a galaxy. I am familiar with this footage, computer generated as it is. The pond always seemed lovely, I think it was in the Netherlands.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Linger on
On Mission Street, cooking fats could be smelled everywhere after sundown, and the dirt puff sleeping bag brown crowd was replaced with drunken car owners. I wasn't carded anywhere, and as I result I do not remember the phone call I read this morning that I had made between 11:30 and midnight.
I get drunk and the street is the encrypted side of a key. I look into the contorts while pacing past, and if one is dark and wide enough, I pee. Haight and Masonic, a store selling sixties counterculture to tourists has printed signs aimed at our empathy, asking if we would like a free public toilet outside of our home or place of buisness. Tonight, I would like that.
Three times smoking, high ranking skanking, and visiting friends. Dolores park was full, a bicycle powered music festival was MC'd by a guy who proudly told the crowd he was living on a friend's roof in an 8x9 tent on Florida street. The band who lived below him, he said, were a real neighborhood gem. The garage from which they practice is a little hole of curious neighbors and post-work beercans.
Working class affectations are in style. PBR advertisements feature loving remditions of the can as made by young artists. A beardo talks about how cool is friend is for cultivating a tan specifically on his left arm. Cigarettes are getting cheaper and more chemically. We are in opposition to the older, more established whites, in our wild and liberated consumption habits.
I stayed hot the whole day. Lots of parties, early June, warm San Francisco nights. I saw Italian esoterica this morning, I guess because of the euro cup. Harpers was finally available in the library when I wanted to read it.
I got home and at some point around the phone call I don't remember making I put on a DVD of Sonic Youth videos. I remember Kool Thing and Dirty Boots and Tunic. I turned it off when my stomach gold turned to yellow. A gallery of local artists had a series of cocks in landscape, cocks in watercolor, cocks in cocks. The gallery was located at the end of the credits in Superbad as well as on Valencia street. They kept the cocks with other queer art in a space they called the back room. Outsider identity is the only identity.
I'm spending money too fast, but my brain feels a cool looseness like a windshield defrosting when hit with warm water. Cracked out. I got a ride back through the city just as the fog slipped over the Eucalyptus topped dog shit factories.
Today, free show at Stern Grove, which I'd rather call Rock Creek Park, with the guy made famous in this country by his association with Wes Anderson and David Bowie and blackness and Brazil.
Also Aimee Mann, but I don't have the patience or the curiousity to find out what that name means or how many of each letter to use when writing it.
I also want to check out the hippy hang out in Golden Gate Park, when I'm dressed appropriately. Earning less than the 8,000 dollars necessary to warrent taxation seems like the only morally responsible way to live when ones society only pays for death.
I get drunk and the street is the encrypted side of a key. I look into the contorts while pacing past, and if one is dark and wide enough, I pee. Haight and Masonic, a store selling sixties counterculture to tourists has printed signs aimed at our empathy, asking if we would like a free public toilet outside of our home or place of buisness. Tonight, I would like that.
Three times smoking, high ranking skanking, and visiting friends. Dolores park was full, a bicycle powered music festival was MC'd by a guy who proudly told the crowd he was living on a friend's roof in an 8x9 tent on Florida street. The band who lived below him, he said, were a real neighborhood gem. The garage from which they practice is a little hole of curious neighbors and post-work beercans.
Working class affectations are in style. PBR advertisements feature loving remditions of the can as made by young artists. A beardo talks about how cool is friend is for cultivating a tan specifically on his left arm. Cigarettes are getting cheaper and more chemically. We are in opposition to the older, more established whites, in our wild and liberated consumption habits.
I stayed hot the whole day. Lots of parties, early June, warm San Francisco nights. I saw Italian esoterica this morning, I guess because of the euro cup. Harpers was finally available in the library when I wanted to read it.
I got home and at some point around the phone call I don't remember making I put on a DVD of Sonic Youth videos. I remember Kool Thing and Dirty Boots and Tunic. I turned it off when my stomach gold turned to yellow. A gallery of local artists had a series of cocks in landscape, cocks in watercolor, cocks in cocks. The gallery was located at the end of the credits in Superbad as well as on Valencia street. They kept the cocks with other queer art in a space they called the back room. Outsider identity is the only identity.
I'm spending money too fast, but my brain feels a cool looseness like a windshield defrosting when hit with warm water. Cracked out. I got a ride back through the city just as the fog slipped over the Eucalyptus topped dog shit factories.
Today, free show at Stern Grove, which I'd rather call Rock Creek Park, with the guy made famous in this country by his association with Wes Anderson and David Bowie and blackness and Brazil.
Also Aimee Mann, but I don't have the patience or the curiousity to find out what that name means or how many of each letter to use when writing it.
I also want to check out the hippy hang out in Golden Gate Park, when I'm dressed appropriately. Earning less than the 8,000 dollars necessary to warrent taxation seems like the only morally responsible way to live when ones society only pays for death.
Friday, June 20, 2008
Skirmish in a Babylon
Seriously, Babylon is just fun to write.
I got on the 71 just as a fight was breaking out in back. Apparently some kids who had BART'd in from the East Bay were thinking that a card game with oppurtunistic hustlers on the MUNI was a good way to make some money. The kid was duped out of fifty dollars and started reachign through the hustler's pockets and found himself held back by a couple of the hustler's friends. The busdriver waited until it was over, and then phoned in to MUNI headquarters to tell them that there was a fight going on at 8th and Market. I got to the back of the bus to hear the kids complain about those shifty card players. It's not like the card players have jobs, and it's not like if they didn't have friends they could've gotten away with that shit, they thought. Some white girl next to them agreed that the whole situation was hella wrong, and I drummed like a motherfucker on my knees.
It's hot today, I think that's why everybody is going apeshit. I would really like to buy some pot. People roll blunts on busses, in this day and age. I was even offered one at the price of 15 dollars, something I at the time considered exorbitant, but would now totally go for. I'm writing now not from the main library but the Presidio branch, which Richard Brautigan described in the mid sixties, the only difference being his library was open 24 hours a day and housed unpublished manuscripts.
James Brown's In A Jungle Groove is one of the CDs they have here, the other one being Live at the Apollo. Good choices both on a day like today. An old woman is talking to herself,sitting in the line. She asked me earlier if she could use the computer after me. I said yes, so long as she sits in the line, and nobody else sits in the line before her. She got sad. I got kinda sad too.
Other old woman is confused about the way the library computers work on an hourly refresh. Lots of looking at clocks. Holy shit, am I addicted to the internet. Talk to yourself in this chair, I insist.
I got on the 71 just as a fight was breaking out in back. Apparently some kids who had BART'd in from the East Bay were thinking that a card game with oppurtunistic hustlers on the MUNI was a good way to make some money. The kid was duped out of fifty dollars and started reachign through the hustler's pockets and found himself held back by a couple of the hustler's friends. The busdriver waited until it was over, and then phoned in to MUNI headquarters to tell them that there was a fight going on at 8th and Market. I got to the back of the bus to hear the kids complain about those shifty card players. It's not like the card players have jobs, and it's not like if they didn't have friends they could've gotten away with that shit, they thought. Some white girl next to them agreed that the whole situation was hella wrong, and I drummed like a motherfucker on my knees.
It's hot today, I think that's why everybody is going apeshit. I would really like to buy some pot. People roll blunts on busses, in this day and age. I was even offered one at the price of 15 dollars, something I at the time considered exorbitant, but would now totally go for. I'm writing now not from the main library but the Presidio branch, which Richard Brautigan described in the mid sixties, the only difference being his library was open 24 hours a day and housed unpublished manuscripts.
James Brown's In A Jungle Groove is one of the CDs they have here, the other one being Live at the Apollo. Good choices both on a day like today. An old woman is talking to herself,sitting in the line. She asked me earlier if she could use the computer after me. I said yes, so long as she sits in the line, and nobody else sits in the line before her. She got sad. I got kinda sad too.
Other old woman is confused about the way the library computers work on an hourly refresh. Lots of looking at clocks. Holy shit, am I addicted to the internet. Talk to yourself in this chair, I insist.
Babylon Children
Little Tiny Little kid. His T-shirt was bright red with a blue pill in the middle that had the words "LA LIFE" written inside of it. He was shaved bald, had an ipod in the ears, and reminded me of a bloodsucker. He had a skateboard.
Bland posturing preteens. Get off or get on at Fillmore street, home to about six thousand blacks as recently as the 1960s, now home to less than a thousand. But the neighborhood banners still feature a black jazz musician against a deep blue background. Sophistication.
That kid was seriously half the size of a normal person. He just stood there in the middle of the aisle, barely able to see over his proped skateboard, well groomed and with pinchable cheecks, standing on the verge of getting it on.
He scared me, I guess. Badditude of money as a petulant little white thing. I worry that I was him. Am him. War in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, war on being able to retain my stash. Library is kicking me off now.
Bland posturing preteens. Get off or get on at Fillmore street, home to about six thousand blacks as recently as the 1960s, now home to less than a thousand. But the neighborhood banners still feature a black jazz musician against a deep blue background. Sophistication.
That kid was seriously half the size of a normal person. He just stood there in the middle of the aisle, barely able to see over his proped skateboard, well groomed and with pinchable cheecks, standing on the verge of getting it on.
He scared me, I guess. Badditude of money as a petulant little white thing. I worry that I was him. Am him. War in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, war on being able to retain my stash. Library is kicking me off now.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
The English paper was unacceptable, I redid it, and am reconsidering the implication that I would post future essays on here. School is a lot less consuming than I thought it would be.
I don't smoke tobacco and will stop pretending, even if that means my inability to participate in a UCSF study which offered thirty dollars in cash for an hour of survey. I tried smoking a cigarette while waiting for the bus on an empty stomach, and ten minutes later had to request a stop before Forest Hill station, so I could hurl in a stranger's lawn. I sat next to the mucus and tar spotted stomach water, feeling better and naked, until the next bus came.
Forever, and ever, you'll be in my heart and I will love you. Together, forever, we'll never will part oh how I love you. There's a scene in Monterey Pop where John Phillips is talking with Dionne Warwick's handlers on the phone, saying he wishes to speak to Dionne. I say a Little Prayer was one of the top billboard hits in 1967, and therefore the itunes album cover art is some shitty .gif in florescent reds and blues that says Age of Aquarius Top 100, or something like that. I guess at the time fame was a cabal of love and hair that grew flowers, with even the cultivated purity of Warwick and the cultivated counterculture of the Mamas and the Papas on a first name basis.
Smoke was rising from an orange orb above a scattering of single unit California rancho style houses, and we are in the police car, moving through the streets angling and weaving towards it's epicenter. The car stops, the camera looks over the roof and the glow is real.
"POLICE, Your house is on fire!" He knocks on the door and then looks towards a divided window. "Sometimes we just have to kick it in" he explains to the camera, "-POLICE, your house is on fire!" He kicks in one of the windows. "Police", his breath not allowing for all caps, "your house is on fire, get out". The baton hits and breaks each piece of glass, presumably so that the occupants of the house can hear his voice? Maybe there isn't anybody home? "POLICE YOUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE GET OUT NOW!"
An old black woman in a natal nightie comes down the hallway and opens the door. She is mostly deaf. The policeman reiterates. She rationalizes the situation, and says she must put some more clothes on. The officer searches the house asks her questions to determine if she is the sole occupant, and she answers while putting her clothes on from the other room. They rush out the door, and wait for a second squad car to arrive. Once outside, it becomes clear that this lady's house was not on fire, that the fire was coming to a neighbors house. The young officer, smile not obscured by his prickly mustache, apologizes and promises to replace the windows, free of charge.
In another episode, the Dallas policemen are free of calls, and so they decide to go to a neighborhood where there "is known to be drug trafficking," hoping to pick somebody up. We roll up next to some dilapidated Victorian with a dozen black people hanging about. They pick out a bigger guy with an Afro style haircut, some overly dark patterned golf shirt that I imagine could not have been made outside of the first Bush era, and nondescript khakis. He's standing to be frisked, the camera records the nervous analysis of the officers and, at half volume, the outraged heckling of the neighborhood. Suddenly the dude bolts by the side of the house and the guns are out. He rushes into a chicken coop, in the process getting rid of whatever it was he had on him, and the suspect is apprehended.
Like always, the officers dissect the situation before the video fades and we see the COPS logo and go to commercial. Like always, they mention how some people just choose not to work for a living, and some people have to feed their families. In the America of COPS, we are still a frontier, agrarian nation. Willie Loman is a righteous homesteader. The darkies have nothing to protect and nothing of value, and only exist outside of the borders, to steal and scalp out of disrespect.
Fascist overtones aside, it is a great show. Or at least, one that I can't help but watch anytime I'm home and it's on. Dallas cops get a call about a man selling flowers on the street. The officers explain how little they care for these calls, and we cut to the actual encounter. The man selling roses at the intersection is terrified, it is raining, and the sirening cowboys have arrived. They motion to him and he approaches forcing himself into a minstrel smile that could fit a melon half, saying he's just there to sell some roses. The cops ask him if he feels safe doing so in the rain. The cops ask him if he feels he is blocking traffic. The smile only breaks when he cognitively hears these accusations, and even then it's only for a second. He bows a lot and explains that no, he's just selling his flowers, and we're holding back tears. The cops ask that he continue to feel safe and not block traffic, and then drive away.
I'm in an awful place, like Another Saturday Night, except I wouldn't have a girl under each arm if I were back in my home city, either. I am reminded of my inability to talk to people when I find on the bathroom floor a bookmark I had been using. On it was written my phone number and a brief explanation of the fairly universal circumstances which I felt required I give a stranger my number. I remembered writing it after an orange haired girl sat next to me on the bus, reading the guardian and taking interest in my buttons. It was a long ride on a very full 38, but as the bus cleared she got up and sat next to some dude in a VANS tank-top who seemed like he felt he had no choice but to move to California since he was the weirdest dude in his South Carolina town. I folded the note then and there, placed it where I had been reading, and got off to gorge myself on Indian food.
It's brighter today than it has been in a while, fogless and warm when I left the house at 6:30, but somebody is turning the lights out on me. My class is held in a room without windows, and the power inexplicably turned off for a full 20 seconds, exciting the kids into outburst, A Russian accent said "How Romantic" and Linda fanned the excitement off of herself. In the darkness, I stretched my legs and looked for deliberate symbolic meaning in this action. I threw away about 30 Hot Dogs this morning, and the guy I'm renting from never came home last night. The last I heard from him was this email:
Edwin,
I don't want to have to tell you this all the time because we are
grown men. Stop with the toilet seat. Its loud and annoying. Everyone
else hears it and they don't like it either. Stop dropping the toilet
seats, Edwin. I don't how it is where you come from but we don't do
that kind of shit around here. I find it disrespectful because I
already addressed this to you and you are still doing it. Its getting
on my nerves and its getting on everyone else's nerves. We don't like
it Edwin. You do it early in the morning and late at night. I was
respectful enough to ask you like a man to not do that this morning.
Email this time. Don't let us hear that crap anymore, its selfish and
disrespectful.
Sonny
I'm worried he's drunken himself dead in a ditch somewhere, only because his already psychologically destroyed children would then have to fend for themselves on the streets of San Francisco. I fucking wish I got KMEL on my ipod. fuck mp3s. Secession. Radio es la futura.
I don't smoke tobacco and will stop pretending, even if that means my inability to participate in a UCSF study which offered thirty dollars in cash for an hour of survey. I tried smoking a cigarette while waiting for the bus on an empty stomach, and ten minutes later had to request a stop before Forest Hill station, so I could hurl in a stranger's lawn. I sat next to the mucus and tar spotted stomach water, feeling better and naked, until the next bus came.
Forever, and ever, you'll be in my heart and I will love you. Together, forever, we'll never will part oh how I love you. There's a scene in Monterey Pop where John Phillips is talking with Dionne Warwick's handlers on the phone, saying he wishes to speak to Dionne. I say a Little Prayer was one of the top billboard hits in 1967, and therefore the itunes album cover art is some shitty .gif in florescent reds and blues that says Age of Aquarius Top 100, or something like that. I guess at the time fame was a cabal of love and hair that grew flowers, with even the cultivated purity of Warwick and the cultivated counterculture of the Mamas and the Papas on a first name basis.
Smoke was rising from an orange orb above a scattering of single unit California rancho style houses, and we are in the police car, moving through the streets angling and weaving towards it's epicenter. The car stops, the camera looks over the roof and the glow is real.
"POLICE, Your house is on fire!" He knocks on the door and then looks towards a divided window. "Sometimes we just have to kick it in" he explains to the camera, "-POLICE, your house is on fire!" He kicks in one of the windows. "Police", his breath not allowing for all caps, "your house is on fire, get out". The baton hits and breaks each piece of glass, presumably so that the occupants of the house can hear his voice? Maybe there isn't anybody home? "POLICE YOUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE GET OUT NOW!"
An old black woman in a natal nightie comes down the hallway and opens the door. She is mostly deaf. The policeman reiterates. She rationalizes the situation, and says she must put some more clothes on. The officer searches the house asks her questions to determine if she is the sole occupant, and she answers while putting her clothes on from the other room. They rush out the door, and wait for a second squad car to arrive. Once outside, it becomes clear that this lady's house was not on fire, that the fire was coming to a neighbors house. The young officer, smile not obscured by his prickly mustache, apologizes and promises to replace the windows, free of charge.
In another episode, the Dallas policemen are free of calls, and so they decide to go to a neighborhood where there "is known to be drug trafficking," hoping to pick somebody up. We roll up next to some dilapidated Victorian with a dozen black people hanging about. They pick out a bigger guy with an Afro style haircut, some overly dark patterned golf shirt that I imagine could not have been made outside of the first Bush era, and nondescript khakis. He's standing to be frisked, the camera records the nervous analysis of the officers and, at half volume, the outraged heckling of the neighborhood. Suddenly the dude bolts by the side of the house and the guns are out. He rushes into a chicken coop, in the process getting rid of whatever it was he had on him, and the suspect is apprehended.
Like always, the officers dissect the situation before the video fades and we see the COPS logo and go to commercial. Like always, they mention how some people just choose not to work for a living, and some people have to feed their families. In the America of COPS, we are still a frontier, agrarian nation. Willie Loman is a righteous homesteader. The darkies have nothing to protect and nothing of value, and only exist outside of the borders, to steal and scalp out of disrespect.
Fascist overtones aside, it is a great show. Or at least, one that I can't help but watch anytime I'm home and it's on. Dallas cops get a call about a man selling flowers on the street. The officers explain how little they care for these calls, and we cut to the actual encounter. The man selling roses at the intersection is terrified, it is raining, and the sirening cowboys have arrived. They motion to him and he approaches forcing himself into a minstrel smile that could fit a melon half, saying he's just there to sell some roses. The cops ask him if he feels safe doing so in the rain. The cops ask him if he feels he is blocking traffic. The smile only breaks when he cognitively hears these accusations, and even then it's only for a second. He bows a lot and explains that no, he's just selling his flowers, and we're holding back tears. The cops ask that he continue to feel safe and not block traffic, and then drive away.
I'm in an awful place, like Another Saturday Night, except I wouldn't have a girl under each arm if I were back in my home city, either. I am reminded of my inability to talk to people when I find on the bathroom floor a bookmark I had been using. On it was written my phone number and a brief explanation of the fairly universal circumstances which I felt required I give a stranger my number. I remembered writing it after an orange haired girl sat next to me on the bus, reading the guardian and taking interest in my buttons. It was a long ride on a very full 38, but as the bus cleared she got up and sat next to some dude in a VANS tank-top who seemed like he felt he had no choice but to move to California since he was the weirdest dude in his South Carolina town. I folded the note then and there, placed it where I had been reading, and got off to gorge myself on Indian food.
It's brighter today than it has been in a while, fogless and warm when I left the house at 6:30, but somebody is turning the lights out on me. My class is held in a room without windows, and the power inexplicably turned off for a full 20 seconds, exciting the kids into outburst, A Russian accent said "How Romantic" and Linda fanned the excitement off of herself. In the darkness, I stretched my legs and looked for deliberate symbolic meaning in this action. I threw away about 30 Hot Dogs this morning, and the guy I'm renting from never came home last night. The last I heard from him was this email:
Edwin,
I don't want to have to tell you this all the time because we are
grown men. Stop with the toilet seat. Its loud and annoying. Everyone
else hears it and they don't like it either. Stop dropping the toilet
seats, Edwin. I don't how it is where you come from but we don't do
that kind of shit around here. I find it disrespectful because I
already addressed this to you and you are still doing it. Its getting
on my nerves and its getting on everyone else's nerves. We don't like
it Edwin. You do it early in the morning and late at night. I was
respectful enough to ask you like a man to not do that this morning.
Email this time. Don't let us hear that crap anymore, its selfish and
disrespectful.
Sonny
I'm worried he's drunken himself dead in a ditch somewhere, only because his already psychologically destroyed children would then have to fend for themselves on the streets of San Francisco. I fucking wish I got KMEL on my ipod. fuck mp3s. Secession. Radio es la futura.
Monday, June 16, 2008
1st English homework
Michael Paradis
Homeira Foth
English 1B
Response #1
In 1981's Eat Y'self Fitter, bandleader and sonic cosmonaut Mark E.
Smith does what the militaristically tight drumbeat everlastingly
refuses to do and breaks down, muttering scared over the duration of
the track and at one point claiming to have seen the Holy Ghost in the
screen of a computer. That he could find a third of Jesus in the white
space between the words and his cursor comes as no surprise to those
familiar with the drug fueled balls on the wall ethos of self
aggrandizing self destruction that defines Mark E. Smith. But what is
surprising is the Zen-like implication that it would be in the small
things, the mundane things, the ins and outs of a sewing needle, where
Smith has claimed to find his maker.
After all, for a man who seems to have spent his life trying to
replace the Church of England with the cult of Dionysus, one would
expect a little less respect for the everyday tit for tat, or maybe a
suggestion that god was in the music. In James Joyce's Sonny's Blues,
the point is driven home that within music is the human experience,
"…the tale of how we suffer, how we are delighted, and how we may
triumph". Personally, I am torn between the Zen position as expressed
by Smith and the ideas expressed by Joyce.
This is because I have had it both ways. Dub reggae and Ethiopian
jazz, American soul music and deconstructionist European punk rock
have taken me into Sonny's playing. I have no ability to manipulate a
piano, but I take my iPod with me to use as a PowerPoint in impromptu
lectures I give those I would be unable to reach otherwise about that
music, and therefore about me. I have taken the hard drugs,
disassociated myself from the known to know anything. The Holy Ghost
is there, human history and the essence of life springs from the tunes
like I need to tell Ponce De Lyon, but there is still something to be
said for the simple things.
And that is because to accept life in this society is to bring on a
shit parade of the simple things. Brick and mortar, bread and butter,
they are what happens between waking up and going to sleep. The music,
the ceremony, can only compress and reintroduce that, because in the
end it's all we really know and our art is based on what we know. To
live for anything other than the moment, as one convinced that god was
in the music would necessarily do the moment the music stopped, is to
lose sight of life. Sometimes, the bravest thing we can do is accept
what is in front of us.
Reconciling these two positions is a constant process, and one I do
not think I will likely accomplish anytime soon. When I'm
self-reflective, I am Sonny's brother. When I'm happy, I am Sonny.
When I'm dead, I will be my soundwaves, making their way out through
space for god only knows to hear. Everything sounds spiritual to me
Homeira Foth
English 1B
Response #1
In 1981's Eat Y'self Fitter, bandleader and sonic cosmonaut Mark E.
Smith does what the militaristically tight drumbeat everlastingly
refuses to do and breaks down, muttering scared over the duration of
the track and at one point claiming to have seen the Holy Ghost in the
screen of a computer. That he could find a third of Jesus in the white
space between the words and his cursor comes as no surprise to those
familiar with the drug fueled balls on the wall ethos of self
aggrandizing self destruction that defines Mark E. Smith. But what is
surprising is the Zen-like implication that it would be in the small
things, the mundane things, the ins and outs of a sewing needle, where
Smith has claimed to find his maker.
After all, for a man who seems to have spent his life trying to
replace the Church of England with the cult of Dionysus, one would
expect a little less respect for the everyday tit for tat, or maybe a
suggestion that god was in the music. In James Joyce's Sonny's Blues,
the point is driven home that within music is the human experience,
"…the tale of how we suffer, how we are delighted, and how we may
triumph". Personally, I am torn between the Zen position as expressed
by Smith and the ideas expressed by Joyce.
This is because I have had it both ways. Dub reggae and Ethiopian
jazz, American soul music and deconstructionist European punk rock
have taken me into Sonny's playing. I have no ability to manipulate a
piano, but I take my iPod with me to use as a PowerPoint in impromptu
lectures I give those I would be unable to reach otherwise about that
music, and therefore about me. I have taken the hard drugs,
disassociated myself from the known to know anything. The Holy Ghost
is there, human history and the essence of life springs from the tunes
like I need to tell Ponce De Lyon, but there is still something to be
said for the simple things.
And that is because to accept life in this society is to bring on a
shit parade of the simple things. Brick and mortar, bread and butter,
they are what happens between waking up and going to sleep. The music,
the ceremony, can only compress and reintroduce that, because in the
end it's all we really know and our art is based on what we know. To
live for anything other than the moment, as one convinced that god was
in the music would necessarily do the moment the music stopped, is to
lose sight of life. Sometimes, the bravest thing we can do is accept
what is in front of us.
Reconciling these two positions is a constant process, and one I do
not think I will likely accomplish anytime soon. When I'm
self-reflective, I am Sonny's brother. When I'm happy, I am Sonny.
When I'm dead, I will be my soundwaves, making their way out through
space for god only knows to hear. Everything sounds spiritual to me
ROOTS TRAIN #1
Mr Me Too is cool in the face of danger. Steam whizzing from the ceiling, flashing cyclical red sirens, coughing, choking, sleeping. This is no shower! Hand claps and we're in it to win it, shades down swooping, exhale only.
If my ass is not planted squarely on Muni, pea of the pod, I am walking with Mr Me Too. Dart the city block, suspect the corner, I am the unwilling prop in the photographs of tourists.
We keep the public housing because the iconic neighborhoods would otherwise disappear under a new regime of middle class expectations. Chinatown exists because of rent controlled public housing of a specific racial composition. The Fillmore almost doesn't exist, the spillover from the elevated street of the same name saturating the underbelly with money. But the city pays, after a third of their income, for the rest of the rent of people whose faces make jazz venues and soul food restaurants appear legitimate.
Zoo metaphors abound in traditional descriptions of mass housing, the emphasis being on the animalistic sociology of the place, the impossible task of bringing civilization to creatures unable to assume human form. But a zoo metaphor is appropriate here only from the view of the patron, who for the price of rent and taxation is able to live amongst the wild creatures of the urban jungle, kept there to keep things interesting.
On the trains, the people are there to be read. Girls try to assume the form of poetry, combining rags and feathers from salvation army counters, boots wit' da fur. There are so many symbols in the cultural lexicon hitting one in the face at any given moment one's natural response is just to get stone emotion and into some correct lean. At that point, you are writing.
Problem is, willpower doesn't keep people on trains, telepathy isn't the next step after the shifty eyes. I read her iconography, and it suggested compatibility, but she is available only through online community.
Class divides mean more than ever when one of them has become bionic.
I need to get up and pee. Public computing is cutty like that.
If my ass is not planted squarely on Muni, pea of the pod, I am walking with Mr Me Too. Dart the city block, suspect the corner, I am the unwilling prop in the photographs of tourists.
We keep the public housing because the iconic neighborhoods would otherwise disappear under a new regime of middle class expectations. Chinatown exists because of rent controlled public housing of a specific racial composition. The Fillmore almost doesn't exist, the spillover from the elevated street of the same name saturating the underbelly with money. But the city pays, after a third of their income, for the rest of the rent of people whose faces make jazz venues and soul food restaurants appear legitimate.
Zoo metaphors abound in traditional descriptions of mass housing, the emphasis being on the animalistic sociology of the place, the impossible task of bringing civilization to creatures unable to assume human form. But a zoo metaphor is appropriate here only from the view of the patron, who for the price of rent and taxation is able to live amongst the wild creatures of the urban jungle, kept there to keep things interesting.
On the trains, the people are there to be read. Girls try to assume the form of poetry, combining rags and feathers from salvation army counters, boots wit' da fur. There are so many symbols in the cultural lexicon hitting one in the face at any given moment one's natural response is just to get stone emotion and into some correct lean. At that point, you are writing.
Problem is, willpower doesn't keep people on trains, telepathy isn't the next step after the shifty eyes. I read her iconography, and it suggested compatibility, but she is available only through online community.
Class divides mean more than ever when one of them has become bionic.
I need to get up and pee. Public computing is cutty like that.
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