Death and Life, Gustav Klimt, 1915
sick isn't it?
Battle of Frogs, Kawanabe Kyōsai, n.d. 19th century
Tondal's Vision, Hieronymus Bosch, n.d. 16th century
in the cold spring of 1967, young people flocked to the haight Ashbury looking for something...what that something was was a little more difficult to name, but everyone tried, Joan, herb, LIFE, TIME, everyone tried to figure out what it really was that those young people were looking for. the streets were full of people, everyone says. the streets, the parks, apartments in the victorians was where everything went down, everyone says. Joan says between 3pm and 6pm on Sundays is when shit went down, when fights broke out in the panhandle and the potential for chaos weighed heavy in the air. between 3pm and 6pm today, a sunday, I read slouching towards Bethlehem in a hammock in golden gate park, and at around 4:20 I went for a walk in the haight Ashbury, with one EarPods worth of Jerry Garcia as a control, like a paperweight, a reminder of what everyone said back then. there was chaos, as there always was on haight street, but chaos of a different kind, and I wonder what they would say about it now. I imagined the street filled with people watching the grateful dead, and tried to understand history and time, but I couldn't really figure it out. that's my constant trip these days, trying to make sense of it all, trying to figure out what im looking for too just like the kids who hitchhiked out here in the 60s. the Whole Foods sits on the edge of the block like a Bezos panopticon, an ominous vibe about it, glowing eerily into the night. people line up with masks spaced 6 ft apart outside, waiting to go in and buy organic produce and fake meat. 30-something white women in generic leggings and messy buns, a far cry from the far cooler but probably still as white women who wore Levi bell bottoms and flowers in their long hair and maybe, sometimes, gave their children LSD and peyote, for their benefit, of course. a lot of the victorians on haight have ladders on their front side going up to the roofs, and I figure that's how they got up there, for that iconic picture at the free concert in march of 1968.
haight street is always rife with a colorful cast of characters, ogling tourists no doubt trying to get a glimpse of what is said in all the pamphlets and online guides to be a 'historically important landmark of san Francisco', unjustly hip high schoolers in their finery of baggy jeans, beanies, and knitwear (can you sense some jealousy?), the residual debris of the 60s, those modern-day hippies or sidewalk rats who panhandle for a meal or two and never, ever wear masks, the well-dressed but perhaps out of place tall European couples always wearing sunglasses strutting down the street, a belligerent skateboarder or two, and then some randos who mostly fade into the background, like me, on their way to or from somewhere, unbothered but aloof, who you would never stop to talk to in the way that you could back then. it's strange to walk down haight street to get a coffee, or go secondhand shopping, or run a simple errand, and be passed by one of those egregious Hop on Hop off tour buses, and feel simultaneously like an animal at the zoo, like billy pilgrim, but also like a minor celebrity, like Montana wildhack. the buses go by so quickly, and indulge such a flagrant voyeurism that it's difficult not to have complicated emotions about the whole matter, and instead of us sidewalk looking at them like they did at FURTHUR in New York in 1964, its the opposite, and they look at us, we legitimate patrons of the haight Ashbury, and (hopefully) think pretty thoughts. but maybe we aren't so legitimate, and it's just tourists looking at tourists, just like Joan says about 1967 when all there was was reporters ogling reporters in the haight Ashbury and there was nothing real there anymore, the center did not hold.
in the haight today you find a mix of strange stores -- overpriced thrift boutiques catering to every taste, from victorian period pieces to burning man couture; hypebeast clothing retailers that somehow feel simultaneously austere and hostile but also kind of tacky and passé in a quintessentially LA way; a smattering of restaurants and bars that, on the whole, are pretty nondescript except when they try to grasp at relevance with a cringe Helvetica Neue sign or trendy fusion concept; head shops as far as the eye can see; soulless merchandise shops that sell hippie paraphernalia like $40 tie dye t-shirts or Grateful Dead calendars. actually haight street is reminiscent of melrose, in all the ways I dislike melrose, and you'd be hard-pressed to find something that feels real here anymore.
but then what were those young people looking for, if not something real? in a time of social and economic and political upheaval, it makes sense that disillusioned youth would go off in search of truth, of meaning, of community, of purpose beyond a white picket fence and a stable income. but if things were so bad back then, what, then, would they make of now? our collective atomization has a sort of irony to it, because we are all so alone, but alone together. and that has been true even outside of the pandemic, but if anything, the pandemic has made it better, not worse.
in search of truth, I was walking down haight, and I found it here and there, in the sign for the haight Ashbury free clinic, in the earnest albeit not particularly impressive mural of Jimi Hendrix, janis Joplin, and Jerry Garcia, in the closing sale of the t-shirt shop in the Doolan Larson building, on that iconic corner that made history in the 60s. everything is 25% off because they are going out of business...it has a poeticism that rings true through the corporate vegan hamburger stores and $300 sneakers in display windows.
if the 70s were hollow, and the turn of the decade foreshadowed the end of youth, vitality, truth, experimentation, the hippies, how would we describe now? i'm reminded of a quote from the philosophy of Andy Warhol:
"In the 60s everybody got interested in everybody. In the 70s everybody started dropping everybody. The 60s were Clutter. The 70s are very empty..."
now we have circled back on ourselves, like an ouroboros, like MCM', but what is the 1960s'? again we find ourselves on the verge of societal collapse, of collapse of our institutions and our trust in them, of collapse of the American dream (that one's been coming for a long time), of collapse of our paradigms for making meaning in this world. in the 80s, we had a positive attitude towards grandiose wealth, it was aspirational, it was heroic, now wealth is toxic, a stake in the heart of democracy, equality, justice, values we pay lip service to on national television or over mimosas with friends but know deeply to be absent from any serious evaluation of American life.
what now? the idealism of the 60s doesn't exactly ring true anymore, the focus on the individual, or on retreat from public life, on macrobiotic diets, on turning on and dropping out, none of that really makes sense anymore when we are so severely atomized not only from each other but from ourselves. what feels true is only community, that amorphous thing that we all know is good but never prioritize in a deep or meaningful way, and even if we prioritized it we wouldn't exactly know how to get there or what to do once we did. the apolitical nature of most of the 16 year olds dropping acid in the haight Ashbury would be scorned today, because we all know better, and we learned from them what not to do, those bygone hippies, now 70-some, retired, living in Marin county and bemoaning the socialists and the millennials. Gen Z, for all their attractive chaotic energy and what seems like a visceral understanding of our moral chasm of a society, are not exactly leading the way, bouncing down haight street in gaggles clothed by fast fashion retailers employing Vietnamese child factory labor. but maybe we can't, or shouldn't, leave it to them to figure out what's next, maybe that's on us, us 20-somethings who read Joan and Bukowski and Nietzsche and graduated into a world where everything is broken and no one who wants to fix it has any power to do so, we who feel so deeply the emptiness of society and its institutions, we who feel the acute pain of lifelong atomization like a knife to the chest. to come of age in 2020 is to flounder in a world that is not made for us, that will not support our survival and thriving and health and happiness, that will resist our radicalization and our desire for more. in the 60s, perhaps, they had dreams for something better, some reason to hope that things could be different, but the neo-conservatism of the late 70s and 80s quashed any reasonable hope that things could get better. what, now, in the absence of idealism? the spirit of chaos is the only line I can really follow through the 2020s, but chaos as an ideology or as an affect is not really sustainable, so: where do we go from here?
at home, we are growing many plants, and we do mushrooms and listen to music and go to the farmers market. at home, we are sort of embracing a return to the relative analog, to the domestic, not dissimilar to the way they did in the 60s, except we still use instant pots and iPhones. we are a far cry from the heroin chic of the 90s, but there is still a thread of angst, dissatisfaction, and nihilism traceable in the Now, at least for me. coming of age in 2020 is characterized by an insistent paranoia that everything is, at its core, meaningless and empty, or that we will die in climate disaster, or that we are doomed to be faithless, or, worst of all, that we are guaranteed to die unhappy or in need, an unshakable and unignorable paranoia, that seeps into everything you do and sits in the back of your mind. there is no cheery idealism of the 1960s, where for as long as you could, you could pretend everything was just fine or believe in a brighter future or remain unconcerned with politics, everyone is too smart and jaded now to fall for that bullshit. still, though, there is no life without hope, and although workplace suicides are at an all-time high, people continue to search for something, young people continue to tweak, and change, and experiment, in search of something meaningful, something real, something beautiful... but what that something is for us in the 2020s remains to be seen. for me, I am surprised to find myself mostly content smoking a cigarette on my balcony, watching the sun set over the pacific behind the fairy lights of sea cliff, on a cold bleak November day that freezes my hands so much that it stops their uncontrollable anxiety-induced twitch of the last few days.
on friday I had probably the worst anxiety attack ive had in the past 6 or 7 years, and it was scary to feel like everything bad from my young adulthood could just come back with no warning
I got a plant yesterday from the plant store, where all the young hipsters work
we said goodbye to Antonio who is going away for a while
I felt residually unwell yesterday and I talked to Catherine about it the whole day but I think I feel better today
last night we realized we haven't been sober for a night in a really long time, so we worked on our picnic blanket and I used a sewing machine for the first time in forever, and we drank zach's happy tea, which it says in bold on the back NOT to take while using SSRIs, but what could possibly be in it....? anyway, im not on SSRIs anymore, but I kinda wish I was just to see what happened...
we tried to sleep early but didn't really ,in any case we woke up early-ish and went to the japanese tea garden for a walk and some tea (free on Fridays from 9-10am) ,and we ran into Victoria there, who also had been trying to wake up early enough to make it for the free hour, and it was so serendipitous that she was there, a Real synchronicity, and I was really geeked on that and the pretty fall colors in the garden and our morning sencha with tea cookies...we dont even really know anyone here and still we run into people, she greeted us with 'my cheap friends!...' haha. it reminds me of when Catherine and I saw Antonio in Dolores, which was just so random, and he'd just gotten back from DC, and we both happened to be lunching in the same spot....
today I didn't have much to do so I went down to the Whole Foods to return my amazon package (you can do that now) and thought about work... the other day we drank some shroom tea on a whim while zach was sort of stressed about his love life and I was sort of stressed about the job I was turning down, and we talked about work and how iPhones and other technology trains you into being a weak dumb little baby who can't do simple things like get up to change a record or return a package... Whole Foods will just take the thing you want to return, you don't have to box it up or anything... I can change the Song from the comfort of the couch underneath a blanket, but is it really worth it? is it really that bad to just get up and switch the record? they've taught us to have antipathy towards work, to deny ourselves the pleasure of being useful and doing simple tasks, to believe that a better life is one of leisure in the sense of laying around and wasting away... they convince us we need the iPhone because it's better for me to be able to sit under the blanket and change the song from the couch than to just get the fuck up... I'm really aware of it now, this trained indolence, especially because I grew up with my mom who has an incomparable work ethic and who always calls me lazy... and maybe I am lazy, yeah, but maybe it's not entirely my fault... if I ask my mom to do anything, she would never be like 'nooo but im so tired....' but im ALWAYS like that... to be honest my ex was like my mom in that too -- would always get up to grab me water, wake up at 4am for work with no complaints, do whatever... actually, both my exes were like that... it's so unattractive to be lazy, im gonna work on that... im always whining about how I dont want to get up... maybe that's my depression.... lol
but doing things can actually be so nice, and if we were trained to just derive pleasure from doing things, we would have no problem doing them... yesterday I cleaned the whole kitchen and bathroom and felt great doing it... it felt so much better than just lying around and wasting away on my laptop... .reminds me of wall-e (coincidentally -- my mom's favorite movie)... we were talking about the 7 deadly sins... sloth...
anyway I thought about that while walking down to the whole foods, where they are slowly training me to not even be able to pack my stupid box, as they have already trained me to order shit online from my laptop instead of just going to a store, which actually can be a pleasant experience ,but not Costco, bc that shit stresses me out... I do hate going to grocery stores too, because there's just so many options and I get overwhelmed... it reminds me of that meme where they're like 'this is a cuban grocery store.... communists are IDIOTS' and it just has one brand of each thing... and im like... that's legit all I want is just one brand of every thing and I would be so much happier... I dont fucking need 800 brands of linguine... it all tastes the fucking same...
I returned my sheets because I didn't like the green, it was too dull, and I ordered a more forest green color. I wanted a coffee but decided I had my pride to lose and didn't want to get a coffee from the whole foods bar ,even though it reminds me of my mom in a funny way. I was craving kind of a bad coffee, a stale drip in a nondescript cup, nothing fancy like an espresso drink, or a caramel cinnamon whatever, something like a free Cobb coffee from behind the counter, reminiscent of all the shitty cups of coffee flavored water we would consume in college... I got exactly what I wanted from cafe Cole, a steaming way too hot cup that I burned my tongue on that didn't taste much like anything, just wet and bitter, just how I like it, and I listened to brighten the corners and felt understood by the world in my misunderstoodness, and thought about being a punk and a misfit in high school... but also being kind of a hippie, and really wanting to imbibe the spice of life, get in the thick of it , really have those experiences that felt like something special, something at the center of the universe, or at least the center of mine...
I remember I started smoking weed with my best friend's crew from high school, who I hung out with because my high school was too far away and I didn't really have a ton of friends there, and we would go over to this guy's house in forest park, except the guy was only sometimes home and his parents just didn't exist, I to this day have never met them, despite going to that house so many times and just getting absolutely shitfaced in the living room, dining room, kitchen, backyard.... such a nice backyard... this guy who we went to elementary school with would always let us into the house, because he had Keys, and sometimes would be house sitting for them, and other times that guy himself ,he was sorta younger than us, sometimes he'd be there but his parents were always out of town, perennially 'out of town' and no one really asked questions, we'd just smoke a fuck ton of weed, drink so much random alcohol, that was the first place I smoked out of a volcano, this guy who was kind of older was there and everyone thought he was so hot, he was known around town, as they might say, and he was there at our weed smoking hangout house with some other guys, and he brought this volcano and I hit it and just went to outer space, later on maybe in my first year of college even we went back and it was different then, we saw younger guys there, we saw the younger brother of this girl we used to hang out with early in high school who we drifted apart from, and we said that's it, no more hanging out here, we're too old, we need a different scene.... I think one of those guys we used to hang out with got in a car crash, and I think one of them fell into addiction , and I dont know where the rest of them are at...
I got high there for the first time, but it wasn't the first Time I smoked weed... the first time I smoked weed was at this bizarre party in high school, right next to Levi stadium, on 420 of my junior year of high school and I remember we showed up at this party and the scene was that of this politics club at my high school, basically like model un, and all the kids who did it knew each other across the Bay Area, anyway they were all there, and the guy whose house it was just had a huge plastic tub, like an insane plastic tub, it must have been like 40 quarts or something, and it was just full of leaf, and I had never seen that much weed in my entire life, and I smoked a j outside with this older guy from our high school and I didn't feel it at all, then the cops showed up and everyone ran, ran, ran, and the guy whose house is was passed out in the bathroom, and first we hid upstairs, then we ran too, outside to the car and I remember chewing a piece of gum in the backseat of this girl's car until the cops went away...
anyway I didn't get high then, I got high for the first time in the backyard of this guy's house in forest park, and my best friend was wearing a shirt and it had a water stain on it and I thought it was a unicorn patch, and I remember being there so distinctly, one of the few memories I have where I can really remember what it was like, what it was like to be there and feel so out of my own body, and everything was so fucking weird but also silly, I took one bong hit and I was gone....
now I have my own bong and I think her name is scarlet begonias, and she's green and beautiful, we smoke all the time and maybe I'll stop smoking when im older, but for now it's kind of a vibe, and anyway I dont really have much to do that it interferes with anyway ,and anyway weed was made for youth....
we used to drive up to Morrison canyon, this one time we went up there and we raced cars, (we really maybe had a death drive) and w were so fucked up, we parked at the barn and tried to climb the fence but there was barbed wire on top, but everyone did it pretty much except me and this girl because we were scared, (in high school I was the scaredy cat of my friend group, which was so different in college) and everyone went into this dark barn and laughed and it echoed through the canyon, and then they all came out and some of them had bloody hands and then we did cocaine in the field outside and looked at the city lights...
the Spotify algorithm sucks so bad and is so fucking annoying. when I try to go on song radio it just gives me shit ive been recently listening to even if it bears no resemblance to the song that I started the song radio with. I just started the song radio with life during wartime and it fully is giving me the replacements and the Grateful Dead in the song radio. can you believe that? they are NOT SIMILAR!!!!! ... I HATE spotify
I paint pretty pictures… Im reflecting the world through my eyes.. im listening to Grateful Dead songs and trying to paint how they make me feel… sometimes Im not thinking at all and I just do what feels right… giving color to my internal state… inching towards yeses.. feeling the wharf rat beat blues…foggy harbor San Francisco north beach Cassady nighttime street lamps misty twilight wet air dewy fog brisk wind cold on the skin dark all around.... pretty city lights sutro tower sparkling like stars hilly poet paradise... buena vista dirty hippies Haight sidewalk glam at dusk Whole Foods window glint hypebeast glow.... fog drifting carried over the water into the city Fishermans wharf 1930 maritime vibes not ikeavision....great highway wet and sticky chilly peril quietude of night....whats happening out in the sunset at 1:17am sleepy people sleepy town java beach cafe... presidio tree trunks shiver in cold night barracks empty ready for wartime....life during wartime... bunker barren forts cleared leaves rustling in San Francisco haven for outcasts... hunkering homeless poeticized cast in moonlight sidewalk wharf rat... noir street covered in rain dark slippery air shining silver against indigo warm porchlight open windows music spilling out into the streets... raindrops pattering moody blue golden glow inside outside....the sun will shine in my back door someday...
John Cale came to New York on a scholarship from Aaron Copland... isn't that so random?
im actually gonna freak out.... I just cant even conceive of what it must have BEEN like to be in sf in 1955... what kind of people lived here? what did it feel like? what did people do? what did they look at, and find beautiful? what must it have been like to be here without cell phones, the internet, Tesla Facebook apple? who will tell me?
LMAO apparently Rebecca solnit will
today is a rainy day in san Francisco, like zach said, perfect for sitting in bed and lounging around, I made a bowl of muesli for myself this morning and zach just made some fancy hot dogs, I was reading something about how artists used to live cheaply back then, In the 40s, 50s, and ate hot dogs every day, but there's no way they were eating the kind of hot dogs that zach just made, with organic Sonoma County pickles and wagyu beef franks and chipotle mustard, there's no way they could afford the kind of lifestyle our coder and designer salaries allow... zach says he'd be fine eating hot dogs every day, as long as they were the kind we just ate... gluttony seems to be a hallmark of the HENRY experience these days, whereas before maybe the creative kinds were necessarily downtrodden, and maybe they still are and there are still starving artists, but then what do you make of us, we anarchists, we with cushy work from home jobs where we do 'trend forecasting' and 'creative consulting' and 'infrastructure engineering,' but we want and believe in so much more, and really desire to create something meaningful and important and just, but also we like our fancy hot dogs, with our fancy local pickles, and there shouldn't be anything wrong with that...
of course I say this all tongue-in-cheek, but it is interesting to note... back in the 50s, 60s, they were rejecting modernity, capitalism, structure, institutions, the rigidity and formalism and commodification of mediums like books poetry art, we got conceptual art, performance, trying to move away from the commodity fetish, trying to reject what it was that said this is a Book, this is a Painting, this is a Song, but that's tired now, and now what we have is even more sinister, now the medium is amorphous and what is really being commodified is experience, lived experience, startups like Nudge that do what I do, make plans with friends, but as a service, pop-up stores in Los Angeles that on the surface seem to subvert what a Store is but actually are just trying to sell you something, concert series promoted by brands like Red Bull instead of bill graham or Chet helms, even the gala or the art show or the art party put on by a gallery, selling the idea of something, of cool, of cultured, of clout... so hollow! what would it mean to really subvert that, subvert the Store, subvert the Experience, subvert the Plan, subvert the Party, detournement their ass and come up with something real sly and new and fun... the days of raves at Cornwall are over, what's next....? San Francisco, tell me what's next?
I feel like I've been thinking a lot recently but can't figure out how to put it into words for e-worm... it's so different from before, when I felt like I could write about anything, for however long, at any time...
I was driving back from palo alto a couple weeks ago along the panhandle and listening to morning dew at the end of Europe 72 and hearing jerry Garcia's voice drift out over the night lawn, pitch black, and it felt so meaningful, rich, a croon to crown all croons... it reminds me of the line-- "once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right"...
my new favorite song is wharf rat, from the end of dp24... it just SOUNDS like a wharf rat.... dont ask me to explain what I mean by that...
I just feel like Robert hunter just draws these pictures with the lyrics that evoke such strong emotions for me, and just feel so truly like a *thing*, and then the band just takes it to the next fucking level and like paints it in and then it just drives me crazy I feel like an all seeing eye or something... like how they keep saying in the documentary that sometimes you have these moments where you can grasp life at its most bare, look at it square in the eye, and really see... or something...
in the sex and the city episode we watched the other day, Samantha was like -- 'honey, it's like the blind leading the blind!' I've been thinking about that so much recently, in terms of relationship advice, and life advice in general, from all these people around you, none of whom REALLY know, but we all just (myself included) guess and insist, guess and insist, that we are right, that you should trust us, that we know...
now that I think about it maybe that's unwoke, as if the blind don't know what's going on, maybe we should rephrase that phrase... add it to the list of unwoke sex and the city one-liners...
im sort of addicted to unwoke television from the 2000s, I think, its just so much more enjoyable to watch things that offend, surprise, make you think 'I can't believe they just said that, did they really just do that?'
Talking Heads - Life During Wartime - Stop Making Sense 1984
is taste real? I was talking to my mom about people having different taste while we were in line for the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the de young, and she seemed perfectly happy to admit that people have equally legitimate different tastes...wonder why I find it so hard to believe that? maybe my main character syndrome (I dont really think I have a lot of that, but I think the Aquarius contrarian-ness is a perfect substitute), but more my real steadfast belief that some people just like bad things... and some things are bad? and aren't good just because someone else says they're good... case in point, mitski's last album, Carly rae Jepsen, and the last great american dynasty... haha. among other things!
David Byrne in the once in a lifetime music video is exactly how my internal monologue/ internal life feels these days... reeling but not in like an im gonna vomit way, but in a jerky I feel actually crazy way, something like Joan Didion's feverish and insistent hand movements, but its all happening in my head, and actually maybe im not moving at all....and there's maybe a humor to it, or a self-aware kookiness, but also kind of a seriousness, and a legitimacy, and a truth to it...like this really is how it be, or this really is how it feels.... what is it? it is that this is not my beautiful wife...
talking heads vibes reminds me of David Henry nobody jr
lol maybe I'll write about this someday but (nothing but) flowers reminds me so much of my mom
Mercedes Benz kind of has same energy
Logging back on while on my pre-sleep tinder game to say what needs to be said: liking nathan for you and eric andre is not a fucking personality trait
when I was little I was so into canopies, like the kind you have over your bed, and also beaded curtains for your door, and also hammocks, and hot tubs...and velvet, and satin, and anything fuzzy or furry...
Honey bears suck
Sf renaissance
Curators can be good
Identity politics bad
Ego in art- good or bad?
Why cry?
Grateful Dead Live at Northrop Auditorium, U. of Minn. on 1971-10-19
Vibing to 1971 northrup show.... first ramble on rose! and europe 72, sugar magnolia/sunshine daydream is sooo good on europe 72! China cat sunflower onwards in particular is just a total vibe, ending on morning dew makes me so emo!!!!
An interview with Garcia in The Rolling Stone Rock N Roll Reader offers this perspective on Garcia's approach to musical styles:
"You have to get past the idea that music has to be one thing. To be alive in America is to hear all kinds of music constantly--radio, records, churches, cats on the street, everywhere music, man. And with records, the whole history of music is open to everyone who wants to hear it. ... Nobody has to fool around with musty old scores, weird notation, and scholarship bullshit: you can just go into a record store and pick a century, pick a country, pick anything, and dig it, make it a part of you, add it to the stuff you carry around, and see that it's all music." (pp. 259-260)
Reading
https://ella.e-worm.club/The_Bathtub.gmi
And its so funny how eworm is j a place for our collective neuroses to unfold..... splayed out on the web, unabashed and honest and ultimately helpless.... a feeble yelp into the void!
last Thursday we went to the Ferris wheel in golden gate park, erected for its 150th anniversary, and we smoked a glass j on our way there. we thought we'd be in and out in 30 minutes or so but the line was hundreds of people long, and we waited for about an hour and a half, slowly coming down from our initial high. I was starving, as always, and went to get a hot dog after 5 minutes or so of deliberation as zach held our spot in line. when I got to the hot dog stand, I happened to order the last hot dog, and the hot dog woman said 'sorry all, that's our last hot dog...' as I was in line. everyone behind me (including this little kid) groaned and, partly because I was high, I felt bad at stealing the hot dog opportunity from the rest of them. the hot dog woman realized she should have waited till I left to tell everyone, and she felt bad and apologized. there was a lot of feeling bad, but it was funny since it didn't really matter. anyway, the hot dog was excellent, and brought me some brief joy while waiting in the chilly autumn air in a line that didn't seem like it would ever end.... the line feels like it takes up more space in my memory than the actual ride itself, which maybe is how it goes with all things, but particularly maybe because the ride was nothing to write home about. it's a testament to the natural beauty of san Francisco that a ride whose entire purpose is to elevate you to heights with a spectacular view is necessarily made redundant by the fact that you can access breathtaking views of the city on any old afternoon walk. and somehow then they feel even more poetic, stolen, private, erotic than those that you pay $20 for tickets to. turning a corner and seeing mt sutro up here in the Richmond gives you a sense of voyeurism, but the innocent kind, since you're not offending anyone, and somehow that makes it better, even though maybe the point of voyeurism is to be transgressive... anyway, the view was fine, and we went around the wheel a couple times, then made our way to nizario's for some pizza and mescolanza for tiramisu. we bitched about how the red scare girls don't like nizario's, and how that's indicative about their lack of taste as a whole. there's a light blue vintage truck in the window of the Toyota dealership I like to look at on my way home from Geary...
on halloween, we drove up to Sonoma County to go to a pumpkin patch – I wrangled my friends to join me on my steadfast mission to go to a corn maze, something I'd never done before and have always wanted to do. we grabbed a bite to eat in Petaluma, and I told them about polly Klaas, and how my dad had so many locks on my door because he was paranoid I would get stolen in the middle of the night... the coffee and pastries from della really hit (way better than that fake European bakery in carmel), and I remembered stopping in bleary eyed and Dramamine-d up with my ex's family driving up to Mendocino a few years ago. we were all dressed sort of absurdly and I enjoyed taking pictures of everyone, but we didn't look as absurd as these dogs we encountered that day — one was a huge fluffy poodle looking creature, like a dog that was meant to be small but resized on photoshop to be half the height of a human, and then a weird wook of a dog with matted dreadlock fur that was equally unsettlingly huge.
From Petaluma, we drove to the pumpkin patch in Santa Rosa, and were made fools of by the Sonoma sun, as we were all smugly dressed for fall (sweaters, wool, plaid) and it decided to be a hot, dry 80 degrees. we shed our layers and smoked Darren's new vaporizer device, I with caution since last week I accidentally hit it backwards and burned my lip. Antonio thinks smoking is what caused his covid scare so he did not participate (lol). we got kettle corn, got pictures on the hay bales, and did the corn maze, and zach kept throwing ears of corn up into the air from behind to scare us, and also everyone kept running away and trying to scare each other. Except me, of course, because i was too scared of getting lost. Antonio and I recorded tiktoks of ourselves doing the 'say so' dance, and when we finally made it out of the maze, sweaty and determined, we went to the pumpkin patch to pick out some pumpkins. there was the most bizarre attraction there, a cannon that shot tiny pumpkins at high speed to fuck up some rusty old cars. I could totally understand the appeal, and if I were less tired I might have made an effort to shoot some pumpkins myself, but instead I sat to the side and watched with awe as people loaded the pumpkins into the military grade looking cannon and totally murked these cars. I wonder when that contraption was invented, it seemed like a pretty old setup, and I was gleeful as an onlooker because it just seemed like a perfect game to fulfill such a base human need, the one to just fuck shit up for no reason in creative ways. the appeal of senseless destruction...
How it Works: The Artillery-Grade 600 MPH Pumpkin Cannon – "Brute Force and Ignorance"...
we got lunch at a biergarten in Petaluma, again, and I was happy to be outside on such a beautiful fall day. small towns really emote fall at all times, but there is something special about tree-lined streets shedding orange, red, yellow, and something even more special about being able to drive such a short distance out of the city to explore. driving back into San Francisco was a trip, the golden gate bridge was sparkling, at its best, and though I am always reminded of Elliott, and then my dad, driving on it, the poetic sort of beauty (which in turn maybe necessitates tragedy, sadness, grief) is never lost on me. in any case, there wasn't much time for thinking or dwelling, since we had to rally to get ready for the night - halloween! I rapidly did my snake makeup and we set off for Antonio's in the mission to pregame, albeit 1 hour late, with no idea that our night would get cut short by so many misadventures.
a brief spell of body dysmorphia gave me pause in Antonio's bathroom, where I tried to take so many pictures of myself and every single one disgusted me. but when I looked at myself in the mirror, I thought I looked fine, good, even beautiful, but somehow I couldn't figure out what wasn't working on camera. this made me really sad for a bit, but nothing a couple shots couldn't fix (tequila, the reigning antidote to any bout of self consciousness) and soon we were on our merry way. but not for long, since darren lost his wallet traipsing about and dancing with a band of somewhat sus characters, and zach sprained his ankle going too hard to man by skepta jauz remix (can we imagine a time when that song wasn't part of our party repertoire?) we went back to Antonio's to kick it and order Thai, but what really stuck with me was the main character-ness of the whole night, where we (ok, really just britney-Antonio) had the attention of what seemed like the whole mission, and as we strutted down Valencia I really felt there was no one cooler, hotter, more fun, more young and vibrant and exciting than us.... and of course it was maybe all the tequila, but also I think there was some truth there, and maybe that's how the merry pranksters felt back in '64 when they were rolling around in Furthur, and they knew they had something real special going on. no one else in the mission was up to speed, and people kept turning their heads to call out, 'britney, britney!', and in general there seemed to be a sense of awe surrounding us that I don't really think was all in my head. it made me excited to think that maybe there was an audience for us, for general merriment, for pushing boundaries, for doing whack shit in the city, and maybe its more that people are scared or misaligned than that people are hostile. people surely loved us that night, or at least they did britney, and when we went home early I didn't really feel like we had missed out on much.
sunday we went to the farmers' market, I with a vague hangover, darren and zach a few bong hits deep, and we bought flowers, olive oil, veggies, and everyone was nice and the weather was pleasant (if a little too hot on the scorched pavement in front of Eats). I love the clement street farmers market, and it always does seem like the hipsters are out in full force (it makes me think, do others see us the way I see them?). there weren't any cute guys this time (sad) or maybe I was too hungover to notice. I think I said that last week too.... haha. im sad we'll be going back to fremont this weekend, so we won't get to do our little sunday morning ritual, but it will be nice to shake things up a bit. after the farmers market, I was already high, and so I spontaneously decided to eat a little shroom, and was immediately transported to a place of moral quietude. I drew some, and listened to the grateful dead, and felt at peace with life, love, the lack thereof, the road im on and wherever it may take me. it was a therapeutic sunday evening, a time that for me historically has been laden with discomfort and anxiety, and I thought to myself that I am grateful for things just being nice. the other day I cried and cried about how scared I was to die, and then I cried and cried about how thankful I was that I enjoy being alive enough now to feel a desire not to die. I thought that if a fear of death is the price to pay for a life mostly devoid of the pangs of severe depression and suicidal tendency, then by all means it is worth it.
Can you believe none of that was even about biden and trump... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I feel fucking sick to my stomach... i dont have faith in anything. Im scared to die, i dont believe we are going anywhere, i feel like it is immoral to have children, i am wasted and i feel like love is fleeting and elusive and i just dont feel confident that anything will work out... i didnt ask for this, i didnt choose to feel this way or be alive during this time, i jus feel scared and confused, terrified and hopeless, and i feel like everything is dark, politics doesnt give me enough of a mythology to feel faith.... i just feel depraved, the emptiness of life, and i cant believe earlier today i was ebiking downtown and singing i know you rider in my head... i sat outside in my underwear and just felt the godforsaken depravity of it all sink into my bones and cried these forlorn drunk tears which cant even fully comprehend the meaninglessness of it all, the nihilism, the what is the point of all of this, the i am scared fucking shitless to die, the who put me here, the who decided i have to go through this.... i feel so physically ill i just dont want to be here anymore....if i think about it too much i cant breathe...
I'm going crazy listening to Cassidy 8 million times... maybe its cuz I'm on my period but it makes me so emo...
if nothing else I will spend my whole life as a 1960s sf amateur historian
Im reading about John Barlow and who knew he founded the EFF? and was also a sus libertarian or something? and he WROTE CASSIDY... California is so actually crazy, this j reeks of the Californian Ideology...
the more I read about John Barlow the more I'm just like :O. this dude had a fucking actually crazy life. actually insane. I would KILL to have had some of these experiences...
there is some radioactive shit underneath this ground I swear... I just cannot believe this connection between like cyberpunk and deadheads... I guess it makes total sense but is also just totally inconceivably absurd...
specifically I cant stop listening to the version of Cassidy from dicks picks 24 from cow palace... I listened to so many others and I was like these are just not as good as this one... and then I just found out that that was the first recording! serendipitous...
I'm reading more about Neal Cassady now, too, and wow, this shit is just wild..... nothing much I can say that hasn't been said, but Im just soaking it all in like a sponge... maybe someday we will be like this...
what is just totally fucking crazy to me is that London breed is the mayor of this absolutely dystopian city that we live in, that I work in, that is just so insanely beautiful and has such a rich cultural history, and is where Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened city lights and Peggy caserta opened Mnasidika and now we have whatever the fuck we have now, like Peter thiel and zuck and whoever the fuck else has overrun this city, VP of salesforce whatever the fuck, and I guess I'm kind of a product of that too, but also whatever, you're allowed to hate yourself... hahah
it just doesn't compute for me.... squaring this city I hate so goddamn much for what its become with this city that I love so much for what it was and now even sometimes in some ways is...
just HOW could all this have happened here, and HOW could it have gone so awry? I guess this a question phds probably spend their whole lives trying to figure out, from a housing perspective, a politics perspective, a cultural perspective, a technological perspective.... I just can't understand it.... can anyone? I so wonder what the people who are my grandma's age, who lived through all of it, who retired to Marin amongst all the whites, what do they have to say about all this? now Lawrence Ferlinghetti is 100+ and nearly blind, and maybe the great saga of San Francisco is coming to an end... or maybe like a phoenix it will burst forth from the ashes and a resurgence of vitality, hedonism, culture, Cassady will emerge from san francisco... from all the yoga startups and alternative milks and outdoor voices and overpaid coders... (sorry zach)
maybe if I say it enough it will happen...
