Detritus - San Francisco

There's a charm to being frantic and uncollected in your post-grad years. It's expected. But only for so long. The statute of permissible dishevellment runs out shortly after your 27th birthday, and I am now in my thirtieth year. Whatever in life I thought I would be good at, if I have not by this age proved a talent, then I likely never will. 

There is still this beautiful youthful dream of possibility though it becomes each day crafted a bit more of memory and less of truth. Life becomes bounded at corners. You're indecisive. You are no visionary. By this point you were supposed to have written a book and learned Italian, been an admired and respected iconoclast, asked to speak at graduations of your alma mater. Every unpleasant setback was never more than just a temporary stay to your impending greatness, though you now suspect they may together have comprised the path you followed, and will themselves repeat in the coming distance.

The employment options you took which promised limited career prospects and minimal responsibility begin to appear thin and lusterless. The idea you had of making yourself a rounded individual by diversifying your skill through the employment you took calls upon you to answer the lingering question: are you rounded yet? Or will you always be in this protracted metamorphosis? You seem to always be becoming and you never just are, and not in some positive new-age spiritualist, life-is-change sense. Like a hatching egg half-committed.

Your friends make more selfish and more correct choices than to remain pot bound to your friendship. They leave for the best of reasons, for your self-involvement, your inability to see into the future, your lack of discipline. They couple off in more committed ways. They let theirs, and not your, narcissism determine their path. They get high paying jobs with benefits and commute to work from the suburbs, where they've taken up a mortgage. You're still making top ramen on a hot plate and sharing apartments with strangers to make rent.

You take again to drifting like a cellophane wrapper because it's something I can do well. Blowing about Telegraph Avenue, Ferry Terminal, Union Square, Ashby BART, and getting in the background of other people's photos, becoming wallpaper to their dreams. You melt into the urban detritus with the swirling dust and styrofoam cups into the faceless school which describes every city. Which is the city. A part of something greater and apart from something great. 

Nostalgia - Embarcadero - San Francisco

You only get flashbacks if you've been in a war, or a traumatic event, or done a lot of drugs supposedly, but I still get them just the same, every day. I turn a street corner from Mission and suddenly I'm in Minneapolis. The fountain on the interior of the Marriot looks just like the one from the Courtyard hotel across the parking lot from that awful steak joint, and I didn't have to pack my bags or buy a ticket or use that foul steakhouse restroom to get here. Yet here I am the same, standing at a midnight parking lot waiting for the Milwaukee bus. I recover, which is good because I don't want to go to Milwaukee today, and move on and then a few blocks later I've stumbled into Vancouver, agog at all that glittery glass and gulls swishing between the skyscrapers, and my lack of attention has made me trip on the curb and I fall swiftly to New York, the gum-strew pavements, the harried passersby, the stench.

Since I've been back in San Francisco I've been to Chicago, Montreal, Boston, South Dakota, even Geneva, Switzerland and Rome, and I never even left the city. I didn't even want to go. I've been thinking about something else, my mind wandering on lunch, or laundry, or the myriad chores of an unspontaneous life, and had a block of Cleveland fall on top of me. Where am I? When am I? Is this even my life I'm flashing back into? These tweed pants mine? These leather shoes?

I've come to a novel time - novel for myself - that my principal joy should be nostalgia and reflection on the life I have spent rather than the one I am spending, even now measuring it away by teaspoons for the comfort of a gas range and a place to sleep. I feel old. Age has nothing to do with age. After most days of work I just want to find a warm spot to wrap myself in a blanket and fall asleep to the radio.

There is now more of my life behind me than there ever was before, and each day the amount increases. I get a little wistful over that. Not that those days are gone, but their certainty. All those days already planned out and mapped. No additional choices have to be made for them. Each worry unjustified. Each fear unfounded. And they all turned out well. There was always a meal and a bed at the end of each. None of them resulted in the death of their narrator. Sometimes I wish I could have them over, if only for the comfort of knowing the conclusion even as I lived them. All I can get is a pleasant reverie, letting my mind wander back over trails in Vermont, sunrises over lakes in Maine, and really good cups of coffee. Nostalgia is a quiet revenge on mortality. Now on the rough days, the days of bleary adult self-seriousness, every action metered out, I roll the tape back, open the book to the chapters I best like. I may be in an office on a pier under a bridge, but I'm somewhere else too. Off in New England, most likely, breaking sticks for a fire as the frogs start to croak.

I am grateful I don't have to live any of those days over again in the body. Especially the ones I got right. I don't think I could do as good a job the second time.

Book Stalking - Berkeley, CA

Caffe Mediterraneum has become my haunt for books. Like the other dens of vice and criminal caffeination I've come to prefer, it follows the Italian school of bean slinging, though the majority of staff are South American, and doesn't scrimp on the extra F. Also, it's got a pretty good book exchange on the second floor, which has so far yielded two treasures.

Originally, I had thought to do a photo series of the libaries of the bay area, defining 'library' as any congregation of two or more books. But the cost of film is never going to go down, and I have on only one occasion in life been more broke. That puts book buying out of the budget for right now too. There had been a large box of books, prints, and my entire collection of negatives which had been shipped to my address, but through some deliberate negigence on account of my landlady ("I don't know what could have happened to it. It's been on the porch for four days.") they are now irrevocably lost and as consequence she can count on someday being fictitiously - and scathingly - memorialized in my writing.

This means I've have become a more voracious book stalker.

Book stalking is simple. To start out, you simply look for books. Usually this means in bookstores, the internet, municipal libraries, thrift stores, garage sales. For the more financially strapped, it means snatching books wherever they are up for grabs. Coffee shops, at friends' houses, recycling centers, church bins, sidewalks, bus stops. Places books have gone to rest till they can be trotted out again. This really isn't that hard either, though it does require some dedication. It is one of the best ways of getting to know a city. Once convinced of all the places books can be, you go out looking for them, and soon all the previously strange streets gain the sheen of familiarity as you browse them for that elusive title.

Which brings me to the second part, which is the harder one. You have to catch the book unawares. You can't be overly picky about what title you pick up. If you have it in your mind to find the first edition Alexie you will never find it. Or even second edition or older. Unless that is the strategy of deception, and you are using the name of a better known author to cloak interest in the lesser-known, and actually desired one. In which case, you might do very well to set Alexie as your goal if, say, looking for Zusak.

Then there is the third, and final, part of book stalking. I would offer that it is best to keep an open mind and willingness to say yes to a new book. However tempting it might be to type an author's name into Google, or ask a passerby what they know about the Joneses, or to ask what Penguin editors might think of it, just grab the book and go. Read a few pages here, some there, till you are ready to read it as the author intended. Then, and only after this decision to either accept or reject the book, should you do your research. This is a wonderful gamble. If you don't like it then there wasn't much investment. And if you do, you will feel particularly lucky, blessed, fated to have to met this book.

It helps in book stalking to have a fair belief in a concept of meant-to-be, or else chance. To acknowledge the many small, wonderful, and incalculable influences which have made us each who and as we are. Then, just before reading, to succumb however briefly to nostalgia, for the book which you hold has been held before, gazed upon, carried around, examined. Unless they are in imminent danger of destruction - refuse collection, perhaps, or too near a pyromaniac convention - one title alone will suffice. At the Mediterraneum, I believe the other titles will be safe for some time, for other book stalkers or else myself.

The last book I took from the Caffe is 'An Affair of the Heart' by Dilys Powell, published 1957. The cover is torn off, showing the naked title page. Written in tidy cursive is the name E. Colson - Lusaka - June 1963. I thought Lusaka to be a family name, or perhaps somewhere in Greece since the book is about the author's travels in that country. It wasn't until I had read 54 pages in that I thought to look it up and found that Lusaka is the capital city of Zambia. Furthermore, the edition I held was not available for commercial distribution in the United States. I have a fugitive book.

This is something that no electronic book can rival. The testament of paper pages. That E Colson had read from this book in far off Zambia and it had then made its way by hands and shelves to Berkeley, California where I found it at a cafe made it exceptionally valuable. For a used book has not just the value of the author's words, but the value of the reader's experience. I enjoy when I find a book another has written in, underlined different sections, left comments in the margin. Though this particular edition of 'An Affair of the Hear' has none of that.  But it still has the really good words of Miss Powell. Listen to this:

"In 1945 I knew what the capital had undergone since I last saw it. But I could not rid myself  of my romantic ideas. I still thought of Athens as a place of sun, friendly, elegant, cosmopolitan; a place of chattering cafes, small parties, and sophisitacted argument; a place to sit on a summer evening amidst the murmur of crowds and the glimmer of bright dresses..."

How Powell has described Athens, that has been my thought of San Francisco. And when I have thought of San Francisco, I have really, I admit, been thinking of Berkeley.  The right words always come at the right time. Maybe because we never remember the wrong ones.

Telegraph Avenue - Berkeley, California

"It's an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world” ~Oscar Wilde

I had planned to reenact one of my favorite weekend pass-times in Berkeley, which is to stroll Telegraph Avenue, peaking into shops, admiring the dreds and piercings of the rail hoppers, envying the stylish eyewear of the professors, eavesdropping on the students gossiping evenly between Christopher Marlowe and whose sleeping with whom, before getting a book at Moe's books and then crossing the street to read it at Caffe Mediterraneum.

But in January Telegraph isn't as interesting as it becomes in summer, so I did the reverse and started at the cafe. In the upper floor, at the book exchange, I found exactly the book I had meant to purchase at Moe's, but better, because the copy I found was free, hardcover, and signed on the front page "Joe Greco Jr, February 23, 1948." The book in question is The Barbary Coast by Herbert Asbury.

My books have yet to arrive from New York, and I still haven't finished that book, the Skid Road, by Murray Morgan, a history of Seattle's first 150 years. However, I also don't have it with me, so I wouldn't be finishing it anyway.

But now in Berkeley and working in San Francisco, I thought I would read some of another historian. What Murray Morgan did for the Northwest with the Skid Road and the Last Wilderness (amazingly good books, both of them), Herbert Asbury did for San Francisco with the Barbary Coast.

Most famous for his book Gangs of New York, Asbury directed his attention to the seedy underside of San Francisco. Although he wrote during the first few decades of the 20th century, he was keenly interested in the time period from roughly 1830 to 1890, which is to say the time of greatest migration and displacement for all peoples of what is now the US.

Here is the beginning:

"The history of the Barbary Coast properly begins with the gold rush to California in 1849. If the precious yellow metal hadn't been discovered in the auriferous sands of the Sacramento Valley, the development of San Francisco's underworld in all likelihood would have proceeded according to the traditional pattern and would have been indistinguishable from that of any other large American city. Instead, owing almost entirely to the influx of gold-seekers and the horde of gamblers, thieves, harlots, politicians and other felonious parasites who battened upon them, there arose a unique criminal district that for almost seventy years was the scene of more viciousness and depravity, but which at the same time possessed more glamour, than any other area of vice and iniquity on the American continent."

I haven't read as good a beginning to a book since "Call me Ishmael."

From the Vault: Baltimore Amtrak

Driving northeast PA + central NY

I borrowed a car and headed out from my parents' house to visit my sister's family outside Syracuse. I-84 thru Scranton to i-81 at Binghamton, then to NY 80 and 20.

It was a pretty sight. Rolling snowy hills of woods and farms, cleverly hiding - in winter! - the snaking railroads, the cookie-cutter houses, the junklots. Trees in fluted shapes from their competition for light. A low, dishwater grey sky hid the sun. A smoggy mist of woodsmoke and dew shrouding the river valleys. The great eyesore of the interstate highway humming beneath me. Good, grey places, befitting my monochromatic palette preferences.

I feel a fondness for this country, Pennsylvania and whatever else there is of New York north of Rockland. I don't want to say patriotism, as I don't feel particularly patriotic about the US. I'm not proud to be an American, I merely don't mind it. It's just something that happened to me. Besides, patriotism is about nationhood, and a nation is a people. There aren't many nations I gladly call myself member of. But a country, a country holds a people, or peoples, and I've enjoyed every country I've been to, though I've encountered some unpleasant nations occupying those countries. (mostly lesser, petty principalities of the NO TRESPASSING variety)

This country though is familiar from childhood. Oddly, in reflection, I am surprised at how much of it I have seen from this identical thoroughfare. How many hours tallying up to months - years? - of time have I whiled away inside of an automobile? How many errands dragged along to in infancy, coming along for the ride because I couldn't be left at home? Looking out the glass window, the fluted trees, the rolling snowy hills, the droning interstate. Strange the things we get wistful for.

I think most people feel at some point a desire to go back to where they had been a child, if only for a brief while. To the familiar topography and simplicity and looming dark confusion. To the maternal feeling of belonging to a place. It's like what William Burroughs said in 1950 when asked what he would like for dinner. ("A Lake Huron bass from 1920) Personally, I wouldn't mind spending an afternoon in 1992. Provided I would not be required to go along grocery shopping or be obliged to wait in the car.

Just before crossing the state line, I listened to the second half of a hockey game broadcast from Binghamton, not out of any real interest in the sport aside from nostalgia. When I was an undergrad hockey was the only sport that people actually went to see. Of course, there were few alternatives for spectators, as aside from swimming and track the college lacked all other athletic affiliation. Hockey was the sole incarnation of grownup capture-the-flag on menu. The game fizzled out of reception shortly after it was won in a decisive goal an Ontario guardsmen snuck past a Quebecois goalie in the American league.

After that I just let the radio scan thru for nearly a half an hour, playing a slurry of country-western-rockabilly-Jesus, gradually settling onto conservative talk radio, till I got disgusted at the rage and contempt of the host and switched to liberal talk radio, till I got bored at the polite delicacy of panel and let it cycle again. The music stations trotted out the old garage metal of the 1980s like they would never go away, with an occasional dip into the most insipid pop of the present day. I cantankerously switched off the radio.

There's a danger in going back to the place you last lived as an adolescent.

From the Vault: New Orleans