Friday, July 21, 2006

Heat stroke

It's hot down here. I forgot that summer means heat waves and brownish thunderhead clouds by the san gabriels, the san bernadinos. Even by the beach it's hot, no cool wet breeze, just more warm stifling air like the AC is broken. I've been trying to go running earlier in the morning to avoid the heat at its worst, but I hit the pavement after 10 and the sun was already near its apex, already above 80. I made my way down to the bike and running path at the beach where I stop at every half mile or so at a drinking fountain. I take the ramp exit at the park and do the circuit training stuff by the rec center, where all the hoods and derelicts hang out. By this time I'm so sweaty I look like I've come straight out of the harbor and I can taste the salt and diluted sun screen on my skin. There's a very old asian lady doing stretching exercises, she's unaccompanied and I wonder how she waddled her way down here with her toddling, diminutive steps. She's wearing a house dress with bright, primary-color flowers on a bright blue field and navy blue sneakers. Her short hair is dyed a light auburn and at the crown of her head is a seeping white patch. She could be my mother. For a brief instant I think that my dad and his family, sick of her old woman's complaints and arguments, have conspired to send her back to the states and she's been fending for herself at some city convelescent home. I haven't called them since last October maybe last September so I don't know. I have to look at her face to make sure it's not her. The woman's right eye is half closed, but I don't remember which side of my mom's face was affected after her stroke. She returns my stare and facing her now I she looks too chinese to be my mother. Mayhe it's too hot to be exercising. I watch her as she waddles away and I try to remember how dark my mother's bare limbs were last time I saw her.

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

SF Mem 11

SF Mem 10

I don't miss San Francisco: 17 Reasons

1. What is the opposite of nostomania. (I learned this word the other week from word-of-the-day). nostalgia equals stasis equals no where left to run to. I want to go where they're still building and burning down love, still burning down love.
2. I heart LA.
3. I don't want to freeze like Walt Disney or Mark Twain, cryogenically entombed, a simpering sliver of never-scintillating summer to remember my name, any name.
4. They have a saying about this town, but I never knew what it was.
5. Maybe it went something like: Too many good men shanghaied, bagdhaded, haight-ashburied, western-additioned, their hopes Dashielled in the Hammets.
6. Never look back, lest you turn into a pillar of finishing salt to be pinched and plated on a fifty dollar entree at gary denko's for the heirs and heiresses of the western seaboard.
7. My hopes and aspirations withered and died—no, they were murdered—here in this city—Burn all the bridges down to the pillars, let no one leave this island once I've gone——silly rabbit, that's not me, that's that megalomaniac with the hemp jumpsuit and the 99-cent-store superpowers, this town (i.e., all those johns) left a bad taste in his mouth, like drinking OJ after having just gargled listerine.
8, 9, and 10: Cow hollow, Pac Heights, the Marina.
11. Hipsters never die, they buzz around like flies.
12. Have you seen those prices? At those prices, I'll have a lien on my soul before the next boom buries me for good.
13. I will come back to die here if I don't die somewhere else first.
14. I know where they store the rainbow flags off season. I know the garage where, the week after pride, they fold all 525 flags into 21 boxes, each box with a handful of cedar shavings. I know where pride hibernates for 11 months of the year and it beats horribly like the telltale heart.
15. Hippies never die, they buzz around like hipsters.
16. The burritos keep getting bigger and bigger, like little baby bunting.
17. My friends are always with me in everything I believe and everything I do, no matter where we end up.

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

SF Mem 9



This isn't a memory because this is now. I'm back where I was when I first started blogging. Back at Ritual drinking french-pressed coffee and using their spotty wireless. Surprised to find it's packed with people either grinding away at their laptops or after-dinner chatting—it's half past eight in the evening, middle of the week, the yellowish overhead lights and they're playing early stereolab--heavy on the droning guitars and moog, a distorted calliope. The cute hapa dyke barrista--you know the one-- she got her hair done but now she looks too coifed as opposed to somewhere between tussled and bedhead. I left Berkeley at about noon today on a mission to get to baker beach before it was completely fogged over. But by the time I got to the richmond it was pretty overcast. Always the hopeful fool, I rode the bike out to baker beach anyway hoping for a break in the fog. And as I turned off Lake onto 25th ave heading down hill, the sun broke through. I had forgotten that baker beach, the way it's tucked in the corner of the city before the bridge, the fog whips around it, a confluence of different wind fronts, leaving it fairly sunny--enough to get a tan--eventhough the neighboring beaches, china beach, fort point are fogged over. There was barely anybody there, a handful of nudists camped out just before the rocks. I tanned my bare ass; I think I'm slightly sunburned.