Found Days in San Francisco

Sing your song and dance your dance--time is short. Let's us return to hiking the city. It's Saturday, and Lioness has had enough of the big ville and people who keep randomly talking to her--which they do, just up and talk to her. Like it's her job to be Metaphysically Available or something. It's a drag. Anyway, she's for staying in, and I'm for going out. Sometimes singing your song is done very low and close to the skin and indoors, sometimes not. First there's breakfast and then sandwiches from the micro-Whole Foods call Le Beau , the Nob Hill market, with these two (-->) as company. The cats who own the flat Lioness sublet for the month are my kind of people.

Goals, seek Princess at the Westin, get to City Lights, walk around China Town. I have a list of books to buy that I want to be from SF. We look to plan the route by bus. It makes sense. But, by the time I'm outside, I'm walking, testing my sense of the town's shape and off I go. Downhill for a very long time. This is to the good, but not of my right knee which is missing a ligament and gets cranky about steep and downhill. Whatever. Everything is gorgeous, new, a gift. I'm thinking about the long tradition of DIY here, and how SF just keeps its cool and lovely in spite of most pressures to turn into Dallas (which every city is pressed to do, and most, smartly refuse). I'm thinking about the future, about how much Work there is to do just keep the planet habitable. That these trees and critters evolved to live in a world at a certain mean temperature and with certain average weather patterns. The change we are unleashing will be too quick for them to adapt to, and they will die/migrate. And then there's people to look after, alway. As Henry said it looking back over the history of sapiens sapiens: In no instance did the genius of a people wait until the political and economic life had been arranged in Utopian fashion. No, they just got on with it. I'm thinking, walking down hill, that I really have to stop freaking out that the big picture is so big and just get on with it.

Princess and Boy Detective. Wow. I can't tell you how glad I am that other women have such strong mothering instincts. I have some, but they don't seem rule me. Princess is delirious and raw with lack of sleep (months of it) and yet herself, with her warmth and wry wit. We talk babies, and BlogHer, and my writing and future. She's of the opinion that one of my superpowers is Encouragement. Hmmm. This is a natural part of teaching, I say. She says, Sure, but there's lots of community based ways you can use that gift, with the disadvantaged and the advantaged both. There's no promise that those born lucky also know what to do with themselves. Meanwhile, BT is sampling the dirt and pigeon feathers of Union Square, toddling in circles around his mother. So, this is a thought I'm mulling since. Where to use an ability to see how people light up and their voices drop half an octave when they're thinking about things that make them alive. Helping them figure out how to do that in the world and keep a roof/fill the belly. Human beings cannot be turned out like machines, we do not take the form proscribed from above or outside. We must take our own forms, and teaching is not the only method of helping humans stay human. Hmmm.

Also, as I walk, I find myself surrounded by French people, as if the consulate kicked everyone out for a day on the town. I try to eavesdrop a bit on their conversation, but they're all saying the same things I'm thinking: where's the bus to _____?, surely there's a cafe on this street?, so forth. The cheap dollar means the Europans gets to fly all the way West. Good on them. They need to see that other American style of being. SF is one of those places where America is not prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen. So, I'm glad they're tasting it. The Mothership, I kept saying. The groovy bits of every town I've been to in the US are like out-bases, satellites, probe missions from the spirit of SF. The word uptight simply does not apply here. There's an ease of mingling amongst classes and castes, styles and types, and does one ever have to work hard to be weird here! Your groove, on the stipulation that it not harm, is all good.

I can't find my bus. The stop we located in the morning is on Stockton, which is one way the wrong way. I'm flummoxed before realizing that I just sauntered out of a 5* hotel which has a concierge who knows everything. I approach said Mage, who apologizes for my wait. There's a line, and a Spanish family who want a car for the night and reservations pronto at some eatery, all which is being arranged by, "Hi Sara, it's Mike at the Westin, I need a reservation for eight in an hour..." Suave as can be, and the car for the night $108 an HOUR! OK then. Me, I just need to know where the bus to Broadway is, for which I am provided a map with lines drawn on it directing me personally to my destination and more apologies, to which I just say, Thanks, brother, I'm in no rush. Walk through Union Square to Kearney, that's where the 9x goes uphill. Look up the street. Flat as the prairie but the last two blocks, so a nice stroll in and then upland. And Arrival!

All along the way, I'm in the shadow of the TransAmerica Pyramid. It does raise the question, Why pyramid? A tomb, for crying out loud, and the irony there. Here I am, says this phallus, this pinnacle, this proclamation, a taller, skinnier, monument to ... death. Triumphant as the natural force itself. What we dream we become. We'll get the knack of it soon. We'll learn how to annihilate the whole planet in the wink of an eye--just wait and see. And just three years after H wrote that, we did. We made of the sun a death. But, here in SF, this tomb rises bright and certain and glorified. Up at Broadway, it shoulders up this Victorian beauty which seems to have survived the fire or been built four seconds after it. It's this kind of juxtaposition that gets those CA Language poets running. This is a building that says, Come in, sit with your coffee, live in me. I am wrapped in copper and have missed you always. This is a living thing. It is also, some will know, the home of Cafe Zoetrope, which, yum and pretty. But, I'm not around the corner yet, the corner where the financial district ends and the strip clubs emerge and the bookstore nestles. Alas, that waits the next installment. I leave you then with these images and this meditation: Tell me what it is that man can build, to protect himself, which other men cannot destroy? What are we trying to defend? Only what is old, useless, dead, indefensible. Every defense is a provocation to assault. Why not surrender? Why not give--give all? It's so damned practical, so thoroughly effective and disarming. Here we are, we the people of the United States: the greatest people on earth, so we thing. We have everything--everything it takes to make people happy. We have land, water, sky and all that goes with it. We could become a great shining example of the world; we could radiate peace, joy, power, benevolence. But there are ghosts all about, ghosts whom we can't seem to lay hands on. We are not happy, not contented, not radiant, not fearless. But, we still could be. See, it's right there in that picture.