Betty

Sitting across from her at a cafe spot, I was tired and maybe a bit cranky. I've learned over the years, however, to not let my mood get the best of me when I'm with her; I've acquired the ability to shut off any part of me that's impatient with the pace of conversation.

We held hands on the way there. They felt like delicate moist paper, the same as they did when she held my hand on the soccer field, waiting to go run off to Zoo Camp in Santa Barbara. She somehow still remembers that my team was the Anteaters. 

Amidst my selfish internal hankerings, I suddenly looked up into her eyes as she was speaking, and a switch went off in me. I realized that all I wanted to do was hear her talk, and I would just listen. I could take in the 92 years of collected stories, absorb the immense social changes she lived through, and just imagine the sea of memories she swims in! I could swim with her, riding the waves of a time I never knew, of a grandfather I never met. I was suddenly swelling with infatuation for this woman before me, who mothered my mother, who scolded me once or twice, but always told me I had the best hugs. 

Often I feel overwhelmed with the life I've already lived. If I concentrate hard and survey the canvass of my life carefully, there are so many interactions, so many connections I've made with people, places, and things. Glazing over all that can make 23 years seem like a waste. But to imagine that life four times over fills me with an overwhelming sense of admiration for her that I want to hug her for the rest of her life. 

Empathy

Amongst the rush and tumble, the speeding momentum of the streets that push me along, walking past thousands of fellow dwellers all day long without considering their humanity, I was stopped by a man, and I looked into his eyes, suddenly reverent, and I felt a momentous calm wash over me. These eyes I’d looked at before, even at length, but never quite so deeply. As the idiom goes, I was lost, stuck in the mesmerizing hypnosis of the flaring greens and blues of his irises. For a moment my heart fluttered, and I felt him, his entire existence, and I could see that he was like me. Somewhere amongst my swim in the sea of passionate emotion in his eyes, I reached the edges and climbed up and out, and so I walked on, looking down to avoid the eyes of other men. 

Of Order

Standing in front of the Parc Wyndham 55 hotel on Ellis Street, I look up in awe. Scaling the building upward with my eyes, I am supremely mesmerized by the repetitive simplistic pattern of brown-tinted bay windows set amongst a skin of beige blandness. The sheer size of the building is a thing to remember-- its wide, hefty massing isn't shy to hog up the airspace around it-- but the paved sameness that shapes its identity is so profoundly awesome that I wince at the sight of it; frankly, its an ugly building. Its ugly to me because it ignores its context, in both scale and style, and it is therefore disrespectful to its elder neighboring buildings. 55 Cyril Magnin was the brash "new guy on the block" (and he's literally sitting on the whole block) in 1983 who's looks were forgettable but he insisted in being liked.
The hotel is also ugly because it is an inelegant display of the post-modern take on order. Sure, it is a departure from the modernist functionalism that produced oversized glass boxes (see, World Trade Center), but to me it is both rich in apathy and poor in the humane charm that makes its neighbors so timelessly lovable.

Cities, at their essence, are the attempt to create order on earth. While medieval settlements laid their streets in an organic respect to the land they called home, the pursuit to modernize urban life brought on the linear grid, indiscriminately imposed on the sweeping topography of hills and peninsulas (see, San Francisco). Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisquatsi aptly visualized this with cross-cut scenes of Manhattan alternated with the face of a microchip. Both are obsessively orderly, attempting to tame the erratic chaos of their dwellers, be it electricity or people. And while the street grid is just one display of this attempt to rule and regulate, it is in buildings that this is manifested skyward.

I am a man who has found love in his city, for cities at large, and I love them for all their orderliness. But sometimes I yearn for the rainforest, to stand at the foot of goliath oaks and hear the chaos, smell the irregularity, and feel the splendid disorder that keeps them living so marvelously.

Piano

My fingers do a dance, here and there, making a sound as each of these five legs press down on their standing; a pretty sort of sound though...

they play about, with a motivation of their own, showing off perhaps, and it would seem that they enjoy this, liking the eyeballs that catch them, it is a courting maneuver between the body parts to see who shall be joined in a holy wedlock of sensory unification.

the ears tune in, paying close attention to a whole new dimension of this exchange. the noise-- music, perhaps it might be called-- streams so fluidly that its a wonder how these hands ever learned to play.

Knowledge

I walked this earth alone.
I let the lightning strike me,
the wind, knock me,
the rain, beat me down, until I was a sorry bludgeoned creature. 
There were others, 
alone as well, 
and as well beaten and hurt.
We walked this earth together, 
and what we found was that we were stronger as a collective
than we were separate. 
And it was only together that we discovered
lightning could be harnessed,
and wind could be used,
and rain could cleanse. 
And we were well with this knowledge.

Freshman Scream

The scream began to build up inside of me, festering, gathering, preparing. I look around to see if anyone's there and I see an old woman somewhere I'm not sure where but she's there and I run, holding my mouth with one hand, gripping my hair with the other, imagining this scream well before it occurs, how it might sound, what it might look like, and I'm still searching for a spot alone. I can feel this scream's wants, desires; I suppose it shall birth and then split off into many tinier screams, or perhaps it might explode before me in bright colorful sparks! But alas, my spot reached, above the lake, I throw off my hat, raise my head to God or someone, and out comes this energy, channeled into the scream, nothing moves but me, and I can feel the air around me cary this scream, pulling it out of my throat and into the Big World, and when its all done I sit, panting, watching this scream travel on into the big unknown, and soon I cannot even remember it.

The Café

In an urban environment that lacks the once-plentiful public spaces, there are few remaining venues for critical discussion. Town squares and plazas were once the hotbeds of civic involvement, where citizens would gather to spark the conversations of government, politics, and daily affairs. England had the pub, short for "public house," where men could not only speak freely, but could listen to the literate citizens read aloud the news of interest. In France, it was the coffee house that hosted this informal gathering, and served as an arguably more democratic space, given the [relatively] sober nature of coffee and the openness to both men and women. Skipping a great chunk of American history, we have landed ourselves now at the ideology of "caf é culture."

Cafés have spread their way around American cities in several waves of success and failure over the 20th and early-21st centuries. Unfortunately, through a warped perception of coffee's function and the design of the places which house it, many Americans today perceive cafés as spaces of either solitude or pharmacy. The former is a sight familiarly characterized by Starbucks' innovative wifi service and interior design that favors the lone blogger sipping her latté. The latter has resulted in the grab-and-go coffee fiend that makes quick runs to his coffee shop to get his fix for the next few hours. While neither is inherently detrimental to society at large, an opportunity is often missed to engage in a discussion with a stranger or catch up with a friend. And then there is third-wave coffee...

Setting aside the perceived pretentiousness and class-defining entry fare (a $4 coffee is fair for its quality but hardly inclusive), there are several wonderful things at play in these artisanal cafés. For one, waiting a few minutes for one's coffee to be made immediately slows the pace of the entire transaction, and often allows for the sort of lingering and gazing that lend themselves well to increased social interaction (even if its nonverbal). Second, some of these cafés are smartly choosing to withhold a wifi service in an effort to discourage the anti-social behavior that the Internet often pulls one into.
The emergence and popularity of communal seating in these establishments is a testament to the humanistic need for closeness and socializing. We are often so starved for public space that the opportunity for interaction-- or rather, the chance of interaction-- seen in these surrogates are met with often wild success.

While I would rather see more true public spaces in American cities, I applaud the efforts of third-wave coffee houses to create spaces of community interaction and potential civic engagement, even if it is on the smallest scale possible. It is important to remember, however, that these are not true public spaces, as are most parks, squares, and plazas,  and they are in fact emblematic of the cross-pollination of public interest and private enterprise, but perhaps this is the best we've got for now.

Atomic Dream

I am on the beach, large swells approaching me in progressively greater heights, each breaking a bit closer than the last. The dark sky roared, stirring and churning on itself; I am a digestive chime in the vast stomach of the world.
As the greatest of all tidal waves climbs its way up to the heavens, shaping its body upward, it crashes unexpectedly soon. Fighter jets soar from behind me, dropping small bombs into an angry ocean. Turning to look, I can see that I am standing on a land under attack.

A flash breaks, a sudden luminous presence so bright that the world around me instantly vanishes from sight, and I am thrown.
My body, now just a light material object, is helpless in the air as the blast throws me, and I can feel it becoming undone.
Each one of my molecules I can feel disintegrating, as my precious limbs separate from me...
And at once I am dematerialized, only leaving my consciousness suspended somewhere in a timeless state, leaving me to think: "That was it."
And with those words, all of life's turmoil and anxiety simply vanished, and it was a spectacular feeling.

Park Thoughts

As I sit in front of the skyline, displayed in full from atop Dolores Park, a flurry of thoughts pass through my head.

How can I have starred at this scenic view for so many hours over the years, and still find some stimulation? How do I notice new things each time?

I watch the black cloud of swarming birds move about the airspace, sometimes weaving in and out of the open-air steeple of Mission High. I survey the landscape from high above, my eyes follow the cluster of buildings that bunch together in the eastern neighborhoods, and begin accumulating in mass and bulk as they approach downtown.

This is the divide between town and city, and somehow I love them both.

The town is some Medieval settlement, with humble buildings huddled close together,  church spires penetrate the uniform height limit. The city stands boldly, fronting its gazers from all directions, demanding attention from all. So many of these buildings are brash and ugly, only a few are elegant, with an air of nobility. 

Sometimes I imagine a disaster-- like an earthquake-- dissolving the giants to dust in selectively random succession. The town would remain intact, resilient in a sustained quaint density, while the brash city would crumble like Rome.

Sometimes I imagine a different disaster, that relentless construction and wealth raises the city to limits unthought. Skyscrapers rise swiftly, towering over their predecessors. Maybe a new city rises, or a city within the city. Maybe they'd be glassy and thin, with sleek protrusions to define a new skyline. Maybe they'd be ironclad, shiny but stoic like the giants of Art Deco. Maybe they would destroy other buildings around them, crushing the Old with a defiant New. 

I wish I could be with the birds, flying over the city. I could watch San Francisco from above, swooping over the hills, in and out of the fog, above rooftops and through narrow alleys, to and from those monstrous towers, watch it grow or crumble.