The last time I’ll write while looking out at Lake Merced in the foreground and the Pacific is happening right now. It was a spectacular view, nine floors up, including that Bladerunner day in September 2020 when the skies turned bright orange and Lake Merced went Martian. This is where I started this Substack. This where I started a whole lot of things. This is also where I ended a few things. This is where I started something, ended something, then wrote a whole book about it, not, in any kind of broad or spiritual sense, “ending” it per se, at all. But I’m a pretty firm believer in the notion that little actually ends. Flow is a powerful force.
Our French press and hand grinder is, like everything else, boxed up, so I’m drinking coffee that Ian brought me from the Peet’s down the street. I have felt the truly full-range of my rather dramatically-inclined emotional array at that particular Peet’s location. On high days, I sat and read or wrote or talked giddily to whoever I was with or kinda-flirted-ish with the baristas but not really because they’re all too young for me by a whole, whole lot, and the greatest interaction I can remember is a distinguished elderly man deliberating out loud about whether he should try kobucha and the sweet college kid behind the counter says, “It’s really good for hangovers.”
We (everyone in line) could tell by his tone that he’s so immersed in a reality wherein this is helpful advice that he cannot imagine that there might come a time when this is no longer a concern. The distinguished elderly man said, in a voice as warm and non-condecending as he could make it, “I. don’t. have a hangover.”
Or the time I was walking past a group of teenage boys who didn’t move out of my path and I said, “Excuse me, Gentlemen!” a bit theatrically and as I kept walking I heard the full-throated voice of a young child say, in perfect imitation of me, “Excuse me, Gentlemen!” It was really cute. I didn’t feel mocked. I felt noticed.
Remember the time I went to get my customary matcha-latte-with-almond-milk-and-half-syrup at Peet’s and inflation had shot through the menu so swiftly and intensely that when they told me how much it was I nearly had a heart attack, but swiped my card anyway and started making all my coffee at home from that day on?
I lived life in this place, that much I can say. I’ve lived in fifteen cities covering every region in America and nowhere’s broken me open like this place. Sometimes broken open and sobbing feeling like I was very soon going to die, sometimes broken open like holy shit I’m growing wings. Sometimes both of these in the span of twenty minutes! It has been a time.
Will I never cry in San Francisco again? Weird. I did plenty of it this morning, to be sure, so I think I have it out of the way. But damn it. Am I really not going to see another astonishing (and free!) outdoor concert at Stern Grove? Oh well. I made almost every show last summer at that incomprable enchanted venue.
I guess as I leave I can see why people still like this place. You were there with me when I was convinced that nothing, nothing, was keeping any non-corperate-asshole in this city but the fucking ghost of Allen Ginsberg. I kinda stand by that, to an extent, but in a sentimental way.
I doubt I’ll keep up so dilligently on Hollywood blockbusters now that I won’t be stumbling to the Vegas-gaudy tacky-luxurious plastic-decadent multiplex just a fifteen-minute usually pleasant walk from where I live. So! shout out to Regal Cinemas at Stonestown Galleria for allowing me my various cathartic experiences with The Matrix: Resurrections, Bros, The Woman King (spectacular and in its own category), M3gan (three times), Cocaine Bear, Puss n Boots, John Wick 4, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and The Little Mermaid.
Shoutout also to: nachos with jalepeños, buttered popcorn, Twix ice cream bars, and Hot Cheetos popcorn, all of which I consumed, not together, but paired with various cinematic offerings and with unforgettable glee.
San Francisco, I’ll miss you in the most complicated fucking way I have ever missed anything, and that’s from someone who’s been moving states on a regular basis since I was 12 and grew up with divorced parents. Getting me to miss anything in a way that’s unfamiliar is something of an achievement, and I kind of applaud it, all things considered, even though I know you didn’t go about your municipal ways with me in mind.
I could go on, probably, but that’s mostly because I usually can. I don’t think I can actually do so without the risk of repeating myself, so I’ll leave you with a snapshot of the state of things:
