The city

For the first few days the city seems endless. A veritable offertory of bodies, streets, buildings stacked on top of and in between other buildings clinging to hillsides and concrete, sirens, conversations, storefronts, images ranging from grotesque to mundane. An assault on the full range of human senses.

As I move through the city, I become acclimated to its pace. Busmates split up and explore according to their own whimsical inclinations. San Francisco ambivalently provides a wide range of people. Beautiful people young and old traverse the streets in full regalia. Hipsters in tight Levis and flannel shirts with their large sunglasses and unkempt hair, older-California-types donning expensive handbags and driving zippy cars, homeless wanderers and long time users who push shopping carts down the sidewalks collecting cans and knick-knacks and emitting the fetor of showerless days, college students with messenger bags and Diesel jeans spouting bullshit conversations, single mothers and children in strollers, business men and women, skater punks, health freaks. You get the picture.

After some time here, very few things dictate a double take. (In the few blocks that surround Shotwell house several busses surpassing ours in funkiness have been spotted.) But that is part of the city’s beauty. Out of the confluence of all these images emerge infinite stories.

I wonder how Gary, the homeless man in front of the corner store I frequent almost daily, got there. What keeps him there? What story lies behind the man marching in the gay pride parade with his parents? His parents held a sign that said We love our gay son while he held a sign that said I love my straight parents. This seems both beautiful and foreign to me and I embrace this mutual confirmation of love. In fairness, I also wonder in bewilderment at the spectacle of leather-clad men in g-strings or organic dog food – equally absurd.

What stands out, however, is that this is where we should be. At least for now.

Tomorrow we leave. New bios to be posted promptly.