I saw recently that Donut Farm had moved from its original spot on San Pablo Ave. in Oakland to a much smaller place on Adeline St. in Berkeley. I guess it wasn’t doing so well. This new place is not far away. Still: I think this is a big bummer. Donut Farm had been on San Pablo for over ten years . . . I remember visiting it for the first time in 2011. And when I moved to the Bay Area in 2013, Tim and McCune and all those other dudes and I would eat there every Sunday. It was our weekly ritual. And there were three girls who worked there: Rachel, Amanda, and Lauren (I was in love with Lauren). I accidentally ingratiated myself into their group, and got invited to bonfires and parties at their house on 27th Avenue in West Oakland, in Ghost Town, about a block from where I used to live. And that December, I ended up working at Donut Farm on account of my friendship with them. I stayed for two years, long after all three of those girls had left. I loved that job. You could do anything there and nobody gave a shit. I used to get stoned and borrow the Donut Van and just cruise around. Towards the end I was basically running the place. The only reason I left was to move to Portland in an attempt to make more money. As I have written about many times here, the exact opposite happened.

When I was finally rid of Portland and returned to the Bay in April 2017, I ended up moving into a place that was a five-minute walk from Donut Farm just up the road across the Berkeley border. At night I would walk by the darkened windows faintly aglow with neon signs, and if it was particularly late, round about 3 or 4 am, I’d look inside and see 70-year-old Seng the Donut Master making all the donuts for that day, sometimes upwards of 400 of them. Seng made donuts for Donut Farm 364 days a year. The only day he didn’t was Christmas Eve. He had been a refugee in Cambodia and could build motorcycles with his bare hands. He was 5’5″ and shredded. He spoke essentially zero English. And on those nights when I’d see him in there, I missed him. I did not knock on the window to say hello. Probably he wouldn’t have recognized me, and as I recalled, he packed heat.

Sometimes on weekends I’d get breakfast there with whomever was still left in the East Bay, but that was infrequent. The Sunday ritual never returned and I mourned and still mourned its absence. But it was a comfort to me that Donut Farm was always there, like the Polaris of North Oakland. On that particular strip of San Pablo, there is virtually nowhere else to get food. It was the lone holdout, and now, like most other things that made living in the East Bay worthwhile, the building lies vacant, and nothing will come to take its place. There were two other locations, a small kiosk in the San Francisco Ferry Building, and a sister Donut Farm in LA off Sunset Blvd., near Little Armenia and the creepy Church of Scientology headquarters, both gone now. Only little Donut Farm remains.

Tracey took that picture of me a long time ago now. That’s an ancient screenshot I just found on my computer. When I saw it again, I had a sensation like the floor had dropped out from under me. It almost made me sick on account of how much I miss that time. I had $12 in my checking account and lived on a street where you could hear machine gun fire at night, but it was this special time where a majority of my friends lived 5-10 minutes away and all we ever did was Hang Out. It was beautiful. It’s like we lived in a sort of Wayne’s World universe. Every single person I used to spend those Sundays with is gone now, most of them married, and some of them have kids. The dream is over. I’m the only one who is still a childless bachelor, almost certainly forever, and maybe even longer that that . . .

Alas!! poor Donut Farm. I knew it. I’m going back to California early October . . . I’ll be in the US (and Canada) for a while because I have some weddings to go to, and anyway what the hell else am I supposed to do with my life. And so I will take BART to Ashby Station and walk to nearby Adeline St. to see smaller somber Donut Farm, the shambling corpse of the Once Was. And WHY NOT: I’ll get a cup of coffee and the lemon poppy donut. Maybe a cute girl behind the counter will ring me up, assuming those still exist in the East Bay. And maybe my grief of Donut Farm’s relocation will subside. Or maybe I’ll just go on this way, knowing very little, and getting that little fragment wrong too . . .