victual

I just had the best B.L.T.

That's right, bacon, lettuce, and tomato on two slices of Stroehmann flax and grains bread. I had fresh tomatoes and lettuce in the crisper, a plastic jug of mayonnaise, and a package of bacon. But since I do not eat pork (I love pigs and they should be pets) I instead used turkey bacon (turkeys should not be pets). Bread in toaster, four slices of turkey bacon in frying pan, two slices of tomato, and a thick layer of lettuce. Good eatin'. I even did the dishes immediately afterward because I am somewhat O.C.D.

So, in summation, on this too-humid June evening, it was a delicious B.L.T. for one who is slightly O.C.D.

Why am I sitting here writing this? Despite the wretched weather, I must get ready to go out. Last night it was an excellent time with the cabal at 'Bar on A' (between 10th & 11th on Avenue A - duh). Tonight? Not sure yet, but with the summer heat, it will truly a hot time in the old city - let's hope that aphorism works as a metaphor, as well...

solstice

A full moon of coruscating amber hovers over the city tonight.

Its luminescence subdues my inner dialogue and humbles me with its somnolent majesty. Just a glance through the kitchen window and to the sky in the southeast, and for a moment I am drawn away from whatever thoughts afflict my mind, be it the toil of the creative process or the entanglements of conflicted emotion. The lambent glow makes me realize how minuscule we are here, as if this mortal strand is a hallucinatory whim. We lead our lives beneath vast skies and beyond those skies stretch millions upon billions upon trillions of years of existence. We here on Earth are but the blink of an eye. We percolate in our own fragile lives and deal with events that can shatter and mollify and despoil and uplift and destroy. Occasionally, our place in the echelons of immortality can feel certain. However, the sheer incomprehensible nature of our place within existence evokes the realization that we are but a transient creation. We are a drop of sand through a measureless cosmic hourglass.

Yes, the moon is sublime on this first day of summer. It radiates an entrancing summer solstice topaz across these delicate lives we lead. Beneath it we are children.

spirit

If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it. - Arthur Schopenhauer, 19th century philosopher

There are times when I feel like a ghost wandering through the physical world. It is a curious detachment of my mind from tactile surroundings. I become absorbed in thought and quite suddenly it consciously occurs to me that I have become disengaged - a spirit who sees everything around him but remains unseen. I don't exist. I become a spectre, a phantom... an observer. Still in present tense, I more acutely feel the life of the city effloresce around me, but for those ephemeral moments I don't feel like I am a part of it.

On the city street, in a crowded bar or restaurant, in the cramped cattle car subway, there is uneasy physical contact with the nearest strangers, but my mind is unfettered and independent of the environment. It's all esoteric and abtract.

And why this weirdness, you might inquire...

Sometimes it is an emotional catharsis - an event or circumstance that has summarily altered me in some manner - that has brought on the feeling. It doesn't have to be anything as dramatic as an epiphany, though that has occurred a couple of times. An epiphany can be life-changing and carries far more exigency than simply spacing out on the train and briefly losing touch with the tangible.

Perhaps it is an expurgation of emotion that results in a temporary removal of my mind from the world. Maybe I could just attribute it to fatigue and be done with it.

But "it" is a facet of who I am, and it's happened on numerous occasions in my adult life. Call it ethereal or rarefied or tenuous. I can describe it as a juncture where I reach a recondite form of transitory enlightenment. Not that the experience makes me any wiser, but it does take me away from the physical realm long enough to enjoy a certain understanding of the indiscriminate sequences of life - and to grasp a pattern and a purpose. I am here and I live among this structured chaos - random events and encounters prodded and fomented by emotion and necessity and logic and desire. My emotion. My desire. My lack of logic. The necessity to fill gaps of emptiness.

A Thursday night in June, the prolonged heat wave passed, cool air on bare skin, I feel as I have always felt.

decade

It was ten years ago this month when I again found myself at a transitional moment in my life.

I had lived in San Francisco for a year. The previous August I had found work and living space at the Pacific Bay Inn on Jones at O'Farrell, and had begun film school at the Academy of Art College in September. I inundated myself with a heavy class load, with a concentration on screenwriting and film history. Two semesters were completed successfully (and I had shot my five-minute short, Top Floor, for the final assignment of my Motion Picture Language class). The job at the PBI, though a fruitful learning experience among the forsaken detritus of society, was coming to an end. The hotel had been sold, and the present staff was being cleared out to make room for the new regime.

Luckily, my manager Dave had found new employment at the Travelodge at Fisherman's Wharf, and he recommended me. One interview with the front desk manager, and I was in. I began there as my time at the PBI dwindled.

Meanwhile Dave, our co-worker and pal Mallory, my ex-girlfriend, and I needed a place to live. The search began. Thankfully (and surprisingly) it wasn't a lengthy or arduous quest for a new home. We found a beautiful flat down Post Street near the corner of Lyon (right off the 38 Geary line at Kaiser Hospital). Sure, that wistful side of me understood that I would miss the Tenderloin and my room at the Pacific Bay Inn... just a little. But the flat we moved into was spacious and included 3 1/2 bedrooms, a working fireplace in the living room, baroque woodwork throughout, and a laundry room in the back with washer and dryer. There was a backyard as well, though we rarely utilized it.

There I was, now ten years in my past. I was 3,000 miles from everyone and everything I'd ever known and I had found a measure of achievement in San Francisco. I was ready to enter this new phase of my life there. The hotel and my room there became a memory I have consistently revisited over time, in both my writing and to relate stories of the 'Loin to friends. The "corporate" job at the tourist trap known as Fisherman's Wharf was underway, and though it was something I did not necessarily want to do, it could have been worse.

I had accrued enough knowledge (and enough credits for an Associate of the Arts) at the Academy, and I had to decide if I wanted to return in September. Okay, yes, I wanted to, but I did not want to fall further into the fissure of student loan debt, and I also felt I had learned what I needed.

Sometimes it feels like my life there was a dream - as if it was a step toward change in my life that I would never have had the audacity to ever really take. I suppose that time and distance - and the fact that I have not been back since I departed in August 1997 - have created this illusion. But occasionally I recall so vividly an intimate moment with the sounds and sights of the city. It could be the bray of the Sea Lions sprawled on their wooden planks at the Wharf as the sun rose and I finished a graveyard shift. Or a chicken-steak dinner at Mel's Drive-In. Or a preternatural 'Loin mutant I had to deal with at the front desk of the Pacific Bay Inn. Or the clangor of a cable car bell. Or seeing The Pillow Book, Dead Man, The Crossing Guard, and Dream With the Fishes (among dozens of other films) at one of the city's many independent cinemas. Or a particularly memorable evening at the clubs So What! or Roderick's Chamber. Or that commute to an overnight shift at Travelodge when I was alone on the 42 Van Ness bus the entire time.

I found my direction in San Francisco. I left reluctantly and not without reservation, even if I tried to not let it show. I left behind something that had blossomed, but I departed before anything could wilt. I had to move on and discover my future here in New York City. Ten years down the timeline of my life I have not yet fulfilled each promise and goal of that sanguine, unhinged youth, but strides continue every day. The same optimism that filled my soul when I lived in San Francisco may wane on occasion, but it is never irretrievable.