What a beautiful day, n’est ce pas, loves?
Today is the day that I mark my total absorption of San Francisco as a
bodily phenomenon, an osmosis of an atmospheric conceptual framework, the
agar in which this current incarnation of me was propagated. March fourth is
what my best dude friend, Phil, and I did seven years ago from the blizzard
lands of Baltimore to the jasmine woven hills of San Francisco. Maybe you
heard the story before (do I tell it every year?) but we lighted on a room
right off the panhandle at about midnight, in a strangers beautiful flat
Phil found on Craigs List. I knew 1.5 people in the city, all met months
befor in the crustified sublime death march of fun: Burning Man. Phil’s
mother and her boyfriend picked us up from the airport, already I was in
love with the botany;I felt sure that we got the sweet end of the deal when
the hardened grey snow we had abandoned in the East was replaced by bristled
red combs of bottle brush trees waggling their unearthly fronds at us on
arrival. (I remember weeks later tasting the slightly piquant, sweet,
irascibly sticky sap from the center of a crimson bloom and getting stuck
with a mouthful of slim red bristles, like stubborn pubic hairs. I would
repeat the experience.) Driving in the buxom darkness my conviction was
reinforced when I spotted a street sign reading “Parnassus”, the name of the
oldest of my snakes.

We dropped our Jetblue-allowed 6 bags (5 for me, one for Phil) in the room
we would share for the next three months like drunken summer camp-mates,
each of us bedding down on a donated air mattress, a dresser between our
heads for a sense of privacy. We went out for a drink, knowing almost
nothing, this was before we would even think to google map or yelp our new
hood! I recognized the Goodwill where years before, while traveling with my
family, I had bought a long skirt, some leggings and a sweater out of East
Coast tourist misconception fueled desperation about the weather of
California in July. We found Aub Zam Zam, for my first of probably two
visits there in the last seven years, and after our “taking it all in”,
self-congratulatory beer, we ran into a girl rolling on wheelie shoes, being
pulled down the street by her dog. She led us to Cala Foods (RIP) we bought
a wedge of Gouda, some chocolate and a jug of Carlo Rossi, and sat on a
bench in the astringent moistly breathing Panhandle, wondering at the magic
of this strip of cool, green night. She gave us some organic drugs, we
stayed up til dawn, and then walked her to the Richmond; meeting her
protests about how far it was with the adamant assertion that we didn’t know
where we were and we had nothing better to do. The next night I don’t
recall. The following I called a stranger who would become my first
anthropomorphic love in the city “You big dork” at a bar where I mistook him
for the 1 of the 1.5 people I knew and was there to meet. The rest is
history.

And so now I have San Francisco deep in my bones, in the ink on my skull,
pressed into the spots on my arms. Here I started growing hairs on my chin
(I remember an early experience on Market St. where a girl stopped me to ask
the time and I was awed by her distinct softly curled beard…”Wow, this
place is sooo cool.” I thought), and I learned the deeper meaning of the
word femme, and I have knocked down the lion’s share of my dreams; like a
long desert road stacked with infinitely regenerating rows of slow-motion
tumbling rhinestone bowling pins. The thought that the city lives inside me
now, the certainty that the great wide ocean is crashing just out of sight
and the sweet cool fog will spill down off the slopes and melt and then
spill down again; this is very comforting to me. I feel like I can go
anywhere now, set up camp and still hold the colorful condensed peaks of
architecture under my skin, the swarming schools of people in my cells.

Today I took a walk around the neighborhood, had Bi Rite ice cream for
breakfast, the sexy bee lady at the local fancy honey store surprise bought
me coffee, I got jasmine and wonderfully exploding camillia flowers in my
hair, and a Papalote burrito for dinner. In other words, I had a gorgeous
adulthood-San Francisco-style day. I now my house is full of Swedes and and
a Ukranian and a Gina, all happily typing in a chorus of Mac song.