I’m back in the Bay Area until the 8th . . . and so of course I’ve got those

BAY AREA BLUES

. . . such a thing is inevitable. I knew it was coming and it arrived precisely on schedule as soon as I saw the San Francisco skyline at six in the morning night before last, having come from Los Angeles via bus. I stepped out onto the pavement with my bags and walked towards the closest MUNI stop to take the N train all the way to Outer Sunset, a few blocks from Ocean Beach, where my friend Hannah lives. She has been off filming some movie about mimes the past two days, so mostly I have been hanging around here in the gloom of her apartment, making this face:

. . . and only venturing out once the sun sinks into the nearby Pacific Ocean, and guided into the greater San Francisco metropolitan area beneath the light of the crescent moon above . . . and all the while feeling a sort of heaviness inside me being back in this place no matter how hard I try to fight it off. It is no use: being in the Bay Area brings me down. There will be no escaping that feeling for the next week and a half . . . all I can do is see my friends and hope that is enough to ward off the poisonous feeling in my brain which is brought on by the weight of this place.

I spent the vast majority of my adult life in the Bay Area in California, and though several of the best eras of my life took place here, so too did the very worst. And so saying, I feel a constant ambivalence. I have the sensation of being in a haunted place, witnessing the concrete new overlaid upon the phantom old, remembering people and places that no longer exist, all gone and never to return, but which I can still see clearly in my mind’s eye. It really hollows me out. If there is an antidote to this particular psychic pain, then I’m sure I don’t know it. I reckon that is the price we all must pay for committing the sin of living too long.

In an hour I am going to make my way to the East Bay, to Oakland, and hang out with Alayna . . . we’re going to have a Movie Night in her big cozy house. Perhaps that will do the trick, at least until tomorrow morning. And then I will have to manufacture some new means of finding peace and happiness here upon God’s green earth. Such is my tale.

Well, worst case scenario, I can always go back down to Los Angeles and be welcomed with open arms by a group of people who would be happy to be my friends forever, and maybe even longer than that . . .

(Just kidding~ ☆彡)