McCune and I headed into Oakland from Vallejo around two-thirty to go to his pizza shop, Hesher’s, in Jack London Square . . . I had not been back in six months. For the last two years I have spent October in the Bay Area, and so three or four days a week I would hang out at Hesher’s and read books and write and eat free pizza . . . and after two hours of this, I would take the bus into Berkeley and wander around until it was time to nerkgo home.

And so saying, today I performed this same ritual as a way to comfort myself. I went on a journey through the past. In some sense, it almost feels torturous to me to be in this place and miss the ten years I spent in this corner of the world. Yet today, as with every long walk around my old second home over the last two years, I felt the emptiness of Oakland and Berkeley. Some essential element is missing from both, never to return. Or anyway, I see no sign of it anymore. I can’t place it, but it’s gone . . . Though I suppose If you live long enough, you will experience this ghostly sensation with every city you’ve ever lived in. Still, it is no less painful each time. You walk around and see the phantoms of the Once Was, and wonder at it all . . .

The picture at the top is of the forest around Lake Merritt where I lived with Dante in 2021 and 2022 . . . my apartment was near that tower there, far below. It was my last apartment in the East Bay before I left for Berlin. I have written about this place before, and how I never liked it, nor living by the lake, and how it represents a sort of failure in my life. I associate that time with a despair. Someone had hurt me bad, and I felt isolated most of the time. I can think of only a handful of good memories, mostly Christmas with Laura. This was one of the few places I lived that I feel zero sentimentality for. I could not wait to leave.

Curving around the lake, I got some fruit and yogurt from Whole Foods and walked a little way down the street to sit on the steps of what looked like an abandoned church, or anyway some place of worship. I have walked by it hundreds of times over the years but had never climbed the hill there to get to it until today. At the top I sat down on the concrete steps of the church and ate my food as the sky turned blue and pink. To my surprise a car drove up the hill and parked in front of me. A guy leaned out the passenger window and said: “Do you know how to get into this building?” Said I: “All I know how to do is eat outside of it.” The guy made a face as though I were an insect and the car sped back down the hill.

As a card-carrying masochist, I then walked three miles through Oakland to get to Alcatraz Avenue in Berkeley, not far from my old house there. I bought a bunch of weed from the dispensary on Sacramento and then continued down Alcatraz to my old neighborhood. Going back there again knocked the wind out of me . . . it was the place where I spent what I know now were the best years of my adult life. I miss that place and that time in my life so badly I can barely stand thinking about it, as I can recall it with perfect clarity. One day it all ended, and all those people went away for good, and now I stood outside the gate as the sun set into the Pacific Ocean across the bay in San Francisco.

As a ghost in my old life, I carried on to San Pablo Park, now completely renovated and quite nice, and saw the tennis court there, and thought about all the times different friends of mine had lay there beneath the stars with me. Somberly I kept moving and retraced the same path I had taken long ago night after night, hundreds of them, heading towards UC Berkeley to get coffee at Strada. Tonight along the way, I met a tuxedo cat who came right up to me and rubbed against my leg purring. I knelt down and pet the cat and scratched behind its ears. I managed to read the name tag around the cat’s neck: Oreo.

One of my favorite things about that walk was meeting and befriending outdoor cats and reading their collars. And every time I would return, they would remember me and come to me so I would pet them. Some of them even climbed on my shoulder, or tried to follow me when I finally had to keep going . . .

As I neared campus, I called Monty and we spoke for an hour. I needed advice about something that is happened to me that has not happened in a long time. There are certain friends of mine who I know will give me a straightforward and absolutely ice-cold take on something (Laura, Monty, Amissa), friends who will give me a balanced and neutral position (Emma, Tracey, Leila, Nora), and friends who will give me the gentlest and most optimistic advice (all three Emmas, Kelsey, my little sister). Each is important in its own way . . . and once I have asked someone for advice from these three groups, I can alchemize it all into a little parcel of bulletproof advice. In other words, I create a well-balanced equation, and then make a decision from there. But tonight I needed Monty’s sleepy stoned advice, which I knew would be tough but fair. By the time I made my way through the looming redwoods on campus and arrived at Strada, I had seen the light and heard the word. Now I know what I have to do. The path to my fixed purpose, like the fella said, is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.

I got my stupid little iced Americano at Strada and cut through a group of studying Cal students to get onto College Avenue headed towards the neighborhood Elmwood. My first job in the Bay was on College and so my heart always feels heavy when I walk past the restaurants and shops there. Elmwood almost feels like a self-contained universe . . . I have traversed it many times sober and drunk and on various hallucinogens, and always got water and coffee at the 7-11 near before heading into the hills to see the other night-dwellers like me . . . deer and skunks and raccoons, and on and on. But tonight I had to cut my walk short and book it down Ashby Avenue to get to Ashby BART station on account of I had to be back at Hesher’s by ten to catch a ride back up to Vallejo with McCune. At Shattuck Avenue I paused and thought about this particular person I know for reasons I won’t explain, and continued on in the relative darkness of the Berkeley neighborhoods till I got to the station. I took the Berryessa-bound orange line towards 12th Street station. I walked the nine blocks past mountains of trash to get to Hesher’s. I took a few pictures just before McCune and I split:

Now I am stoned to the bone in my little bedroom here and writing whatever this is. I really ought to sleep. At noon I will wake up and hang out with my nephew Tower, who earlier today climbed up on the couch and sat down in the crook of my arm:

. . . after that, I will head back into Oakland with McCune to visit Emma B. in Berkeley, and kill time till it’s time to head north again. Then I will ride out the nine days I have left here till I go back to New York. It makes me crazy to think about . . . any longer and I think I’d bust. I feel a sensation. I’m breathing jet fuel. There is a sort of intense longing in me that is pressing down upon me, and the only way to get out from under it is to fly 3,000 miles to New York. It is of course because of a Special Person who is waiting for me there, and I will endure that long day to see them again. What can I say: I’m a romantic guy. I’ve got poetry in me.

My battery is about to die, and THIRTEEN is nearly over . . . so I will brush my teeth and slather retinol all over my face, then lie down and dream. In doing so I will place myself one day closer to traveling through space and time to get to New York. Often I wish I could stop time, but this time is different. It is different because in the future awaits all those fun and exciting and good-weird feelings that go along with meeting someone new in that certain way, a long-dormant sensation that had until now made a stranger out of me. This person may as well have materialized from the abyss or else crash-landed at my feet like a meteorite. I have to say: I love it . . . ☆彡