I drove to San Francisco last night. Someone said it was the supermoon, or whatever, so I wandered around for a long time. I saw Coit Tower for the first time. It was way smaller than I thought . . . I guess that it’s on a big-ass hill disguises the fact that it’s like four stories tall. Well, I’ll tell you what: it overlooks Fisherman’s Wharf, and the Ferry Building, and the San Francisco Bay, and the Bay Bridge, and on and on, so it’s pretty OK as far as all that bullshit goes. . . .

When I first moved to Oakland, whenever that was, years ago now, I used to go to San Francisco every few days. I hung out with people I met on the internet . . . and ended up in strangers’ homes, meeting their stranger roommates and their stranger animals. I got invited to birthday parties and warehouse shows and into cars and onto roofs and across the Golden Gate Bridge to Stinson Beach, way the hell up there. I did acid in Golden Gate Park with my friend Danielle, which, lord, was one of the (sorry) Greatest Days of My Life. It was all real good for a while. And then I got bone-deep burned out on the whole thing, and felt like taking BART beneath the Bay was exhausting and time-consuming and expensive, and there was hardly anything over there I wanted to see anymore, having seen so much of it, and so I stopped going.

There was a time, or maybe several times, when I went months and months without ever stepping foot in San Francisco, even though I could see it across the water from Oakland and Berkeley and Albany. I think the longest I ever went was six months. I stopped liking the place is all. It smelled bad and it was full of assholes. It started to look like a different city altogether, now that it had been completely infested with rich tasteless psychopaths.

Well: I think I did more last night in San Francisco than I’d done since I first got here. I walked probably ten whole miles, looping around and around and seeing everything. There was hardly anyone out there. Sometimes there was no one at all. I thought, hell, all right.

The only bad thing that happened is that, turning off Market St., a homeless guy wrapped in a comforter tried to kiss me. He got an inch from my face, and would have gotten me if I hadn’t Matrix-dodged him. He even made that loud smacking lip noise in my ear. I kept on walking while he sort of loomed behind me. If he’d kept coming I guess I would have had to clock him. I’m glad it didn’t come to that because maybe he would have gone nuts and wailed on me big time. I kept on walking and, for god’s sake, here I am, and I can still brag to the world that I’ve never been unwillingly kissed by a homeless guy wrapped in a comforter.

I walked all the way back to the car in Little Italy and got in and drove over the Bay Bridge at 2 a.m. to get home. Whoa! Well hey, I finally had fun in that stupid city again.