leaving the familiar

i wrote this post in the last week of may while i was in san francisco.  i decided to keep it in present tense since that is how it sounds best to me.  what do i know.  a lot!  i have since returned home after the Ride and i have to say that i had an amazing week--much better than any "traditional" vacation by a mile.  enjoy...

i am visiting san francisco for the first time in two years--and it is my first time in the city since i decided, last october, that i would not be moving here.  i came up here in preparation for the aids lifecycle, and when i participate in this event i like to be here a few days beforehand so that i can enjoy the city a bit.  i am staying at a friend's apartment in soma, which turns out to be just the right mix of glamour and grit.  actually, there is not much glamour, but i'm telling the story, so how are you going to know what the truth is?

soma is actually very similar to central hollywood, in that every street varies in affluence and amenities. i discover that within walking distance of the apartment there is a whole foods and a trader joes, as well as the powerhouse bar.  not bad.  i am also offered a deal on marijuana on the street five minutes into my walk.  how is that for convenience?  naturally, i refuse, since i am not about to circumvent the union workers just to save a few bucks.

i am taking in san francisco somewhat differently this time.  previously, i would experience the city with the wonder of someone who needed fuel for the fantasy of moving.  look at the great buildings!  taste the great coffee!  look at the clean air and all the bicycles!  look at the men with beards!  now, in contrast, i am fueling a different fantasy--this being that i made the right decision to stay in los angeles and not relocate.  i don't really need fuel for this fantasy, since i am certain that i made the right choice for my career and my life at this time. but as humans are wont to do, i still look for evidence that supports my decisions and makes me secure in my thinking.  does that mean that you are now going to hear me trash san francisco after enduring years of the opposite within this very blog?  does that mean that you are going to question your own sanity as i rip the city from limb to limb, ranting on not only the expense of living here, but the entitlement of the citizens, and the complete lack of smooth faces?  is that what this has come to?

well, no.  i am NOT going to do that.  there is no reason to.  i still love this city.

i just don't want to live here right now.

well, i would want to live here right now IF i had the money and career to support myself in the city in the way that i am accustomed to living.  but that ain't the case!  i have neither the money nor the career right now to live the way i would want to in the bay area.  i DO have the the wherewithal to continue my usual lifestyle in los angeles, however, and that is no small consideration!  (as i like to say, it is no fun being at the buffet if you can't afford to eat!)

one thing that is very clear to me is that there are no more openings for "homeless person" in the city; in fact san francisco is experiencing a glut in this area.  there may still be opportunities available for "bat-shit crazy druggie", though, but those jobs seems to be filling up fast as well, especially in the evening hours. i do notice a few industrious types combining the two skills quite successfully, so perhaps one must think outside the box in order to win in the san francisco job market.

i also notice that many of the gays here are just too precious--i notice this.  it is odd--they seem way fancy to me.  their masculinity is not "forced" like it is with los angeles gay men, in contrast, it is more fragile, as though one look from me or a "BOO!" would shatter them into a million shards of glass.  there is an entitlement that i sense as well, which is easy to understand, because this city gets on its knees for the gays, and they know it.  but that level of special care can engender a false security--it is the same thing i see in west hollywood.  they walk like they own the streets but have a look in their eyes that suggests otherwise--i see caution when confidence would be the expected response.  to be honest, everyone, not just the gays, appears to be angry or depressed here to an extent, and when i catch their eyes, they seem to be blaming me for this state of mind.  or so it seems.  (or maybe i am just making it up.)  at least in los angeles i am outright ignored, and therefore out of the path of accusation.  i think i prefer the latter!

what would it have been like for me had i moved here?  i can't know, but i can imagine that i would have found new and different challenges to accompany the triumphs.  i like to think of it this way:  i pulled out of san francisco before committing to a relationship with the city.  had i moved here this year, it would have been way too soon, and we would probably have ended up fighting.  this does not mean that i hate it, it means that at this time, we are not a good match.  i remember one time, many years ago, when i did a dating experiment.  i started seeing a guy, and i told him that i didn't want us to have sex for at least a month.  gamely, he agreed to this proposition, and as the month went on and eventually concluded, i came to the realization that i did not want to continue seeing him.  at first i thought that the experiment had failed in that it took away the fuel that would keep the fire burning (sex). but the reality was that i simply discovered, without the gauze of sexual activity, that i was not really into this guy.  it has never failed to astound me how clearly we can think about things when we "bracket" our emotional response to the issue.

san francisco, i will always have a crush on you, but that is certainly not the same as being in love.  i really think that it would be best if we don't sleep together.  don't feel bad--it's not you.  this one is all me.

unrequited loves

we all have them.  all of us.  and don't ever underestimate the power they have over our lives, these unrequited loves.

i often wonder, when it comes to unrequited loves, if perhaps the "one that got away" may actually carry more influence over our lives than the ones that stayed at home.  if i were to experiment on myself, i would then have to assess which category of experience i carry more frequently in my thoughts.  hmmm.

there is a way of thinking that goes like this:  we want most what we cannot have.  many would argue that the best example of this is shakespeare's romeo and juliet.

viewed through a modern lens, the love affair in this play seems almost silly to me now--i mean who could take seriously the "love" between two teens (romeo was 16, juliet was 13)?  and yet, in its time, the characters were very much able to experience passionate love.  hell, in its time most people were married by the age of 16 and dead by 50, but i digress.  where today you would simply have a crush between two young schoolkids, back then it was life and death love.  what made the difference?  for me, the difference is that the love of romeo and juliet, unlike a modern schoolkid crush, was forbidden.  and didn't proust say "rejection is the greatest aphrodisiac"?  not exactly the same thing, but close enough.

of course, for teens, love is most always super-duper passionate, and that seems to be the case no matter what age we are in.  now that i think about it, a good cinematic example of passionate young love surfaced during the last century, and since i recently re-watched this film, it is freshly present in my mind.  i am referring to "endless love", the brooke shields vehicle from 1980.  though not a romeo and juliet per say, it is a portrayal of a very passionate love, or at least a very obsessive love.  it starts out as a lovely snapshot of the times--free love and permissive parenting--beautiful young people exploring passion for the first time.

but then it takes on the romeo and juliet factor:  the love becomes forbidden, and all hell breaks loose. by the end of the film, parents are divorced, a house is burned down, one father is dead, and everyone is fighting.  but you know what?   the love between the two teens endures.  very much unlike shakespeare.

but back to unrequited loves.  love can certainly be unrequited because it is deemed forbidden, but that is not the only cause.  love could become unrequited because it is unattainable due to distance, culture, or age.  love could become unrequited because the object of love does not return the affection or share the feelings.  love could become unrequited because of self-denial, such as a married person not acting on a work crush.  or love could become unrequited because someone decides that it would not be in his or her best interest to pursue the object of affection.  this last instance is the circumstance i want to comment on in this post, since that is how i view my relationship with san francisco.

***

my decision to not move to san francisco broke my heart just a little bit--even with the relief and the confidence that came with my choice to stay in los angeles.  the decision has been on my mind a lot lately, because had i gone through with the move as planned, i would currently be negotiating the last weeks of my los angeles life.  i would probably have made the move in april or may at the latest, and by all accounts, i would probably be freaking out.  but i also would have been excited, a bit.

now i have gone over the decision to stay in los angeles in other posts, so i don't need to cover that territory again.  but i do realize that by not moving to san francisco, i may forever hold the city by the bay in my heart as an unrequited love.  and maybe that is not such a bad thing.

the city of san francisco has a mythical appeal to many, including me.  my favorite myth is that it is where the lost souls of atlantis, reincarnated as current folks, gather to reconnect with one another.

i like that myth, even though i don't believe that atlantis ever existed, or that we have souls that can be reincarnated.  but i digress.  i enjoyed thinking of myself, even if only in my imagination, as a wandering holdover from a long deceased advanced society, and that my move was merely me finding my way home.  haha. i do love san francisco, i do.  but i also wonder if i would continue to love it had i consummated the relationship with a move.  would the mythology hold up among the reality of making a go in a new (very expensive) city?  would the sheen begin to dim as i became more familiar with the annoying crowds of hipsters or the violence in the east bay or the ridiculous cost of living there or the cold damp weather?  would my love become tarnished as i arrived at the realization that i had left behind my entire support group and all my cherished friends?

when i moved to los angeles, it was not because of love.  i moved here because i wanted to make it as an entertainer.  there was no illusion that i was going to love the city. i guess you could call it a "marriage of convenience", devoid of passion, but not unbearable.  los angeles and i used each other.  over time, i have grown fond of this city (and hopefully it has become fond of me), or at least certain aspects of it, perhaps in the same way that one becomes fond of their partner in an arranged marriage.  you deal with it, because that is where you are.

san francisco would have been a move for love.  but would it have stayed that way?  well, i may never know.  but i do suppose that i would continue to love it, maybe in a different way.  it is a great and beautiful city after all, and there is so much to love, and it is so right for me.  but this is not the first time that i have made a decision against passion in the name of good sense, and i have accumulated very few regrets along the way.  one might say that my life is littered with unrequited loves.  perhaps yours is too!  and that, in my opinion, is a good thing, as long as we have some requited love right from time to time. it is possible that i love san francisco more because i am not moving there, but that is not the only shift that is happening.  i also find that i can no longer hate los angeles--because i have chosen to stay here.  so i get to uncover myths behind my being/staying in this city, and along the way, who knows, i may just fall in love.  i just may.

the san francisco chronicles, day three, part one

on the last day of may, i flew into san francisco for a few days of r&r before my stint crewing on the aids lifecycle. i stayed at a b&b in the castro district from tuesday through sunday morning, and i took no netbook with me...instead, i took an old fashioned composition book and a pen. i found myself writing--a lot! this series of posts are my transcriptions of the writing i did in the foggy city. below is day three in the city.

sleep is wonderful. i think about how often, as biological creatures, we need something in order to thrive: sleep, water, oxygen, touch, food. i might add "vacation" to that list. oddly though, it is often when on vacation that i don't sleep. or sleep enough. but not last night--the melatonin did its work. this morning at breakfast i met a whole table full of fellow travelers: saulo and phillipe from brazil, marcus from germany, and my friends from wednesday's breakfast, ann and helen from england. saulo and phillipe are beautiful men--makes me want to book a flight to brazil immediately. but that's another story. the amazing thing about this breakfast is that we got to talking about our respective countries: cell phone etiquette, biking, vacations. and as it so often happens when discussing other countries, i found myself wistful for a place where people know how to relate, interact, eat, drink, and love. since i am not planning on moving outside of the country, i have to go where the best of these options may occur relative to how they are displayed in american terms. to that extent, it is my observation that san francisco trumps los angeles in all of those categories. in fact, i will go out on a limb here and state that i don't even think there is a competition. in los angeles, i think people are forgetting how to eat, or at least they soon will. that is because they are systematically removing everything from their food: dairy, gluten, wheat, carbs, calories, meat, oil, salt, flavor. i mean, seriously!! angelinos, IF they drink, are trying to remove the sulfites from their wine. IF they interact, they are removing, as much as possible, the face to face part of that. they have certainly succeeded in removing voice from interaction--in fact, i know some people in los angeles who boast of never answering their phones--they only respond to text or email!

and love? well. hmmm. that;s a tough one. i have been in los angeles for so many years that i don't know if i have enough of a comparative context to address that one. with food and drink, it is fairly easy to compare geographic experiences--all i need to do is go to a couple of restaurants in another city. but with love, not so easy. what i do know is that in los angeles, from what i have seen, people tend to love publicly, conditionally, conveniently, and temporarily. love is treated as something to "check off" a list, like going to the dentist or getting a job, but i don't know if it is on many people's regular maintenance schedules. it has not been on mine for a while, that's for sure. i think that in los angeles, people are trying to remove stuff from love like they are doing with their food and wine, except with love they are removing tension, commitment, time, empathy, and curiosity, and relying on sex to fill the cup to the brim. and it takes a lot of sex to fill that cup.

the san francisco chronicles, day one, part one

on the last day of may, i flew into san francisco for a few days of r&r before my stint crewing on the aids lifecycle. i stayed at a b&b in the castro district from tuesday through sunday morning, and i took no netbook with me...instead, i took an old fashioned composition book and a pen. i found myself writing--alot! the next series of posts will be my trascriptions of the writing i did in the foggy city.

***

tuesday:
day two of vacation. day one was uneventful, even though it was a holiday. to me, it was just the day i had to finish preparing for my trip. even so, i didn't have to work, and i did make a nice holiday dinner that i shared with my neighbor rolando: baked mango-jalapeno chicken and coleslaw with bacon-parmesan dressing. for dessert, we had chocolate chip brownies with vanilla ice cream. scrumptuous!

anyway, back to day two. i am sitting on a plane, about to depart for san francisco. we were delayed by an hour, so i bought a sandwich and a book in the airport. the sandwich was turkey with cheddar--good--but not worth $8.50! the book is a novel called "the solitude of prime numbers", and it cost $15.00. it is too soon to comment on the worth of the book, but after three chapters, i am already hooked. besides, to me, books are priceless, so i probably am not qualified to assess its worth.

i am sitting next to a nice young woman, and she is friendly and sweet. could be worse. she is with a male friend.

i hope that we do not crash and die. first off, that would be a shitty way to start (and end) a vacation; and secondly, i have not made any provisions for what would happen to all my stuff at home if i were to die suddenly. i would not want either the state or my brother to get my paintings and my books. at some point i will have to make some sort of a living trust so these things are taken care of, but until then, i just hope we do not crash and die.

***

we did not crash and die. we made it safely, albeit one hour late, to san francisco. and to my utter surprise (at myself!), i ended up having a whole conversation with the young woman seated next to me, who by the way is named erica. she was flying with her friend justin, and they had just come back from attending a wedding in mexico. erica owns a store in the oakland area, the rare bird, that sells clothing and art and jewelry, and justin plays guitar for a living, and he does not own a cell phone! (my new hero)

i started chatting with erica because i noticed that she was reading "catcher in the rye", and i was rather shocked. i don't see many people in their twenties reading this book on their own. what impressed my even more is that she told me this was her second time! now can you understand why i broke my own "no talking to people on planes" rule? she told me about her store, and she told me about san francisco, and she suggested that i check out the potrero hill area. i think i will to that--it is not too far from the castro district. before i left the airport, i took a chance and asked if i could snap a photo of my "new friends", and they agreed. i am glad i did, and i hope i get a chance to visit erica's store.

erica and justin, "vogueing" at the baggage claim

disconnecting/reconnecting

there are those of us, who, i suspect, find a "groove" in life and just stick with it. think of liza minnelli and her never-changing haircut. i think the reasoning is: it works, so why change it? i think that personality can be described in this way as well--at least aspects of personality. i subscribe to the theory that personality is never set--there is not a fixed "self"--and yet this same theory also proposes the idea of an innate "temperament": qualities of ourselves that do not change because they are part of our genetics. examples of this would be our intelligence level, sociality (introversion or extroversion), adaptability, sensitivity, and irritability. of course, all of these qualities are also affected by our environment, but what i am saying here is that despite these effects, our temperaments pretty much remain constant throughout our entire lives.

but some things change.

i believe that the things that cannot be categorized as "temperament" change more often in artists than they do in people who are not artists. why? i am not sure, as my conclusion is based primarily on personal experience, as well as observation. but i suspect that i came to this by noticing that certain aspects of innate temperament, for instance, sensitivity and sociality, even intelligence, are heightened in artists. in my way of thinking, these heightened "fixed" characteristics have an effect on some of the changeable aspects of our personalities: perspective, empathy, mindfulness, compassion, ambition, and self expression.

***

last night, during a self-imposed quarantine due to a nasty cold, i watched the film motorcycle diaries, which is the story of che guevara's youthful travels through south america with his best friend.


it was a wonderful movie--i can't believe it took me so long to watch it! but i bring the film into the conversation here because it was during the course of his travels through the continent that che changed, primarily due to the amount of poverty and injustice he witnessed amongst the indigenous people of chile and peru. and as a result of this change, the seeds of a revolutinary were planted. the point of interest for this blog post is that the change occurred during his travels. and from what i saw in the film and have read online about him since, the changes were not to his temperament, but to the changeable aspects of personality.

this is not surprising! theories of personality state that change is often observed as a result of a "feeling process", and usually occurs in the context of a personal relationship. well, both of these were certainly present during che's journey through south america!

why are so many movies made about road trips? my guess is that it is during travels that change occurs with the highest frequency. additionally, in most of these films, people are travelling with someone, setting into motion the two prerequisites for change mentioned above. think "thelma and louise", "easy rider", "it happened one night", even "the wizard of oz".

and this is why, when people ask me why i have to leave los angeles, i tell them that i am interested in the change that will occur. in order to maximize the change potential, i will have to make sure that there is both a feeling process and a context of personal relationship happening during my moving adventure. of course, for me, settling into a place will not end the "road trip", since it may take a year or so to "travel" through my new neighborhood and discover places and people. but i will welcome the change--change that i don't think will happen if i stay here in los angeles (perhaps due to the lack of the requisite feeling process and relationship context). i think that perhaps there is something that happens when we go somewhere else that facilitates feeling processes and relationships. in fact i am pretty sure of this.

so what would i like to change? good question. i would certainly like to change perspective. perspective on what, you ask? well, perspective on people, primarily, but also perspective on myself and on relationships. perspective on friendships. perspective on love. perspective on engagement, interdependency, and aging. i would be happy to start with these areas of change.

***

when i travel up to san francisco next month for vacation, i will be going up with only my cheapie cell phone (it makes and takes calls and texts--no web)--no smartphone, no laptop, no netbook, nothing else. i intend to be "disconnected" from the internet for two whole weeks. i will have to rely on my ability and willingness to engage with others in order to establish any context of personal relationship. in a way, you could say that i am disconnecting in order to reconnect. i am "travelling" away from the safety and security of the internet, and back to the way things used to be done--in person, through personal engagement. i am excited! i intend to take a notebook and a couple of pens so that i can journal in coffee shops and write down future blog post ideas. (when was the last time you saw anyone writing in a notebook in a coffee shop??) i will return to los angeles via the coast, and it will take a week. i will be crew member (for the 4th time!) with the aids life/cycle, and let me tell you, if anything could be called a "road trip", this would certainly qualify! a road trip with incredible and guaranteed potential for feeling processes and personal relationships! along the way, i hope to be reminded of what people (including myself) are capable of: kindness, generosity, caring, creativity, and fun. all along the way i hope to encounter examples of this, and if things go well, i will offer examples of the same.

los angeles is a shitty city (there, i said it!). people here are mean, lonely, needy, and self-involved. and i am tired of being one of them.

i need a change.