this is me doing me

*This morning I woke up, ate a breakfast that involved copious amounts of bread and peanut butter, and walked half a block to catch the 33 bus to the Panhandle. The bus was fairly empty, which wouldn’t have been surprising on any other Sunday morning, but it was on this day, the only Sunday of the year when the young denizens of San Francisco are awake before 10 am. Then again, the Bay to Breakers festivities had started at 7 am, which meant I was late to the party.

*You can tell a lot about the cultural pride of a place by the events that they value. Until Linsanity, most people I knew at Harvard had never attended a basketball game (and even then, he was probably held up more as an athletic token than as a reason to be interested in basketball). At Duke, students camp out to get tickets to March Madness (there are regularly scheduled tent checks to prove tent occupancy). In other words, basketball at Harvard? Very little pride. Basketball at Duke? A completely a different story. Despite the grandiosity of events like Oktoberfest (Berlin) or the Royal Coronation (UK), much can also be extracted about the everyday culture of those places. These extractions aren’t necessarily profound truths, like the fact that people in Berlin really enjoy beer and sausages, or that pomp and circumstance and the dignity of the queen are very important to Brits, but all of these things trickle down to the quotidian—the everyday conversations and interactions you’ll have in a place.

*If festivals and sporting events are apt representations of the cities they’re held in, then Bay to Breakers is fairly accurate. Today was the 102nd annual Bay to Breakers, which is one of the largest footraces in the world, running from the Embarcadero (the Bay) to Ocean Beach (the Breakers). It’s known largely for its crazy costumes, nudity, and debauchery, which typify San Francisco events (most events are riffs off of Halloween it seems; nowadays, nudity is unremarkable and costumes less than impressionable). Is it a race that is actually run? Perhaps, but mostly, it’s partied.

*As an inhabitant of San Francisco, I felt a twinge of obligation to participate in Bay to Breakers, which is a factor of both peer pressure and being twenty-two. And by participate, I don’t mean run. I mean, make an appearance, an expectation I imposed on myself which is the result of that silly thing called FOMO.

*Gentle prodding from a friend was all it took for me to agree to go, which is how I ended up on the 33 bus this morning. I met her at Haight and Stanyan, and we walked two blocks to the Panhandle, where throngs of inebriated revelers, clad in brightly-colored spandex, obtrusive costumes made from very cheap and surely uncomfortable fabric, and often nothing at all, were parading down Fell street. Coordinated group costumes, like the flour-covered bakers in chef hats and the secret service agents who were really nerdy dudes wearing plastic wayfarer imitations and iPod headphones and the people wearing cardboard boxes, were mildly entertaining, even endearing for a few minutes or so. For me, the entertainment value is inversely proportional to the number of septuagenarian penises I see hanging out, though arguably, those free-falling appendages are this city’s charms.

*Though sixty-four year olds are allowed to say that they don’t like large crowds, apparently at twenty-two, saying so makes me a misanthrope. After thirty minutes of merely spectating the Bay to Breakers parade, I felt over-stimulated, as I tend to be often these days. In my apartment, I prefer silence. Despite my self-diagnosed addiction to it, the Internet is too much noise for me. That I have such an extreme aversion to the environments that I’m told I should be loving as a twenty-two year old living in San Francisco (night clubs, bars, raucous parties) is either the consequence of or catalyst to living inside my head, which is a constant and noisy stream of mostly trivial thoughts. And because I’m mostly alcohol and drug-free, there are very few aids to help with the desensitization. Besides, I like my five senses.

*I left Bay to Breakers not too long after I arrived. For me, the most dreaded part of going to any social event is telling my friends why I want to leave. I don’t make excuses; the truth is that when I leave, I just really don’t want to be there. For people who don’t share my constitution, I am an enigma, and more likely, a killjoy. Though I often feel like a misfit for leaving a nightclub before midnight so that I can go home and listen to a podcast and thumb through magazines, I console myself for failing social expectations by telling myself, “different strokes for different folks.” Don’t get me wrong—I love living in a city and I love talking to people—I even enjoy the occasional chat with a stranger—but I’ve resigned myself to not knowing and not adhering to my idea of what a typical Saturday night for a twenty-two year old is. I refuse to subscribe to the idea that this resignation means I'm wasting my twenties away. I'm just choosing how I want to live it, and it's a choice without regret. 

*One of my best friends tells me, in a coy and slightly mocking tone, “Do you.” “Do you what you do,” is what he means. Do the things you love to do and do the things that make you who you are. Bay to Breakers is the San Francisco thing to do—and I will always love the free, unthinking, and fun-loving spirit of it all, but I’m here doing me: in my living room, typing away, with tea and cookies in reach.

this is tooley's in tucson

 

 

 

*In the morning we filled up on a long and leisurely breakfast consisting of non-delicate delicacies of the southwest: corn pancakes with jalapeno syrup, pulled pork, black beans, drippy eggs, and horchata lattes. These were breakfast staples made better by their use of regional ingredients, like coarsely ground cornmeal, which made the pancakes dense and cakey like flattened cornbread, and jalapeno syrup, which, like spicy hot chocolate or sweet chili sauce or Red Hots, playfully binds together the flinchingly hot and the soothingly sweet.

*Becca’s Saturday plan to eat at Tooley’s, a small cafe on a dusty strip of antique furniture warehouses, was the only definitive food plan for the entire weekend. She was insistent. There was nothing better than Tooley’s in Tucson. She said the food was great, but I knew she meant that the memories she built there made the food even greater. No food is better than the memory of having eaten it, of having shared it with another in a very particular physical, mental, and emotional space. Every repeated trip to a restaurant is a longing to re-conjure or prolong or change or rewrite the memories that we’ve stored there. Every craving for a food we enjoyed is a pretense for the desire of a certain feeling we want to experience again.

*We arrived by bike, having made our way through downtown Tucson, under a freeway overpass, through the rattlesnake tunnel, and out onto a street that aptly represented the Tucson aesthetic: colorful, dusty, rusted, and spacious. The walls inside Tooley’s were plastered with bright florals. Succulents with small orange buds gave life to the mostly empty tables. There were three teens in loose cut-off tanks eating inside, and a few people trickled in behind us. We ordered at the counter.

*Becca ordered the same breakfast that she orders every Saturday, “the perfect mixture of sweet and savory,” she told me. If breakfast was psychotherapy, hers would be Gestalt, a whole greater than the sum of its parts. She knew which sides she needed to achieve an optimal balance of gritty and smooth, of smoke and spice, of dirt and fat--the range of flavors in which subtle dischord becomes perfect harmony. Our food came compartmentalized into various plates and bowls, but Becca’s breakfast fantasy, like most of our fantasies do, demanded a specific combination of elements. First she dumped the syrup onto the pancakes, then the black beans, then the pulled pork; then she poked her eggs to break to the membrane of the quivering yolk. A yellow pool seeped into the spongy crevices of her pancakes, mixing like acrylic paints into the black of the beans and the ruddy brown of the pulled pork. It is difficult to look away from a breaking, oozing yolk, a not-trivial moment of either victory or dismay.

*To indulge in the langour of the morning is to rebel against the movement of the day. The leisurely breakfast is not for finicky or ascetic souls, but for the ones who’ve chosen to sit under the sun, with nowhere to be but here, with no agenda but to talk and eat and breathe and shoot the shit with a warm breeze rippling through the rays of heat. We’re here to sop up the yolk and grease and syrup of life during this time of day when the sun is moving from the east onto its overhead perch, and the sleepy souls who’ve yet to sober up are still tucked away in their beds. To get lost in thought, to sit comfortably in silence with another, to be grateful for life’s ephemera in this hot sticky stillness--this is breakfast at Tooley’s in Tucson.

 

this is the desert of my dreams

 

*The desert was the landscape of my dreams, the mirage I had only imagined but never seen. Did you know that everything that grows in the desert is meant to repel? The dry heat of the desert; it makes us desirous and thirsty. The dust and the wind; it blinds us and scrapes at our skin. In the desert we are our most barren and vulnerable selves, unprotected, naked. We come as we are, aware of life’s dangers and the promises we want to reach for. We come face to face with the dissatisfactions we can't admit and the hopes we are too scared to call our own. Like lizards basking in the sun we breathe the light to feed our souls, and once we are full, we recline in the shade. The rocks, they bear our marks; they are stacked to mark the trail. The glass debris in the dirt, the broken bottles we left behind; they cut our feet and make us bleed. Young tanned hide, tattered t-shirts, the smell of alcohol and cigarettes plastered all over their skin. The boys at the cliffs, drunk and yelling, flaunting the desperate machismo of adolescence; the lone girl, slurring her words and flopped onto a rock, one leg in the water, croaking at the boys, helpless. How did she get here? Why did she come? Why does her heart beat? Where did she go?

*I came to the desert to escape the city; the city with its whirring and whistling; the motion and the clicking, the techno-logic that has pervaded the minds of these urban denizens and the flash-mob ideals of fame and riches we’ve wired into the electric synapses of our brains. I came to find respite in a place with little water. I came to see myself more clearly, disentangled from the loves and lives from a place that will always be my love and life. I came to visit a friend. I came to untangle heartstrings, hers and mine both. I came to drink iced coffee outside in the shade. I came to rest. I came to be a lizard, an ectotherm truly. I came so the sun could balance my insides. I came for homeostasis. I came not to do but to be. I came not to find but to see.

this is shitty writing

*I think about writing everyday. Yet at this very moment my greatest paralysis is thinking about writing, like how reading about productivity is my greatest impediment to productivity. The belief that underlies these distracting activities is that I don’t know how to write or how to be productive, that other people who have mastered the arts I lack somehow have the definitive answers to my problems.

*Increasingly I realize that the pieces of writing I most enjoy and admire (this tends to be memoirs, long-form journalism, opinionated and insightful blog entries) require both breadth and depth of either knowledge or experience. The problem with being twenty-two is that I lack both breadth and depth of both knowledge and experience. When I read other people’s writing, I am simultaneously fascinated and humbled. Desirous of the perfect expression and articulation, I make excuses to myself about not having anything to write about or not having anything of value to write about. Yet the end result of those excuses is nothing. I don’t even have shitty writing to show for it. So the cycle continues, of hungering for more of my own action, resenting myself for lack of action, and seeking relief in the words of others. In times of sadness, pain, and confusion, it’s as, if not more satisfying to find empathy (or miraculous synchronicity) in the words of others.

*I could have written this article myself. Ben Dolnick, we must be soulmates. Reading Paris Review interviews has always been my way of burrowing into a writer’s head while trying to adopt writerly habits, quirks, and skills that I hope will work miracles in my writing life. Again, another distraction from action. After reading an interview with Louise Erdrich, I was convinced that I had to physically tie myself down to a chair with scarves in order to quell my restlessness. I’ve considered taking up smoking many times not to construct a writerly image but to build up a rhythm in which writing sessions would be punctuated by smoking breaks. If this sounds illogical, it’s because it is. And smoking wouldn’t be a functional habit anyway, because I don’t want to smell like cigarettes nor do I want lung cancer. But I do want to write. That last statement has taken me far too long to admit.

*At work I am surrounded by very few writers, and by writers I mean people who hunger to write, not just people who can write competently. I am blessed to share an office with a man who is both an editor and a writer, whose understanding of style and grammar hails from the school of Strunk and White, and who urges me to read George Saunders when my outlook on life is particularly bleak (though he says Saunders will not necessarily make my outlook better). To have someone who can commiserate with the gnaw of self-expression or self-articulation or world-articulation helps me to believe I’m not totally insane for wanting to write but not writing, for only talking about writing and reading about writing but not actually writing. Now I’m writing about not writing but wanting to write, and I’m hoping that in doing so, I’m getting all of these shitty feelings out of me and all of this shitty writing out of me like a friend told me I would need to do before I can produce anything I am proud of. So here’s to days and days of shitty writing, the writing that must be done now and everyday until someday in the future. Bear with me in the meantime.

this is hogon living

*In the morning the light was unbearably bright, more golden and harsh than would be expected on a February day. The first light of day makes everyone look angelic; even the shadows that crease into crevices of skin herald the morning light. By dusk, light is soft and glowy, tired from its daylong shining, but the arc of the sun between dawn and high noon is a blazing trail, a space for strength and glory.



*Jasper knocked on the door to say that coffee was ready and offered to bring it to the room. Coffee sounded tempting, but the first moments upon waking, when waking is of your own accord and not out of obligation, are some of the most precious and calm. So we stayed for awhile, basking in that perfect subtle heat. 

*Later we went outside on the deck and had coffee with Jasper. He was wearing a long furry scarlet robe, with a NY Times crossword mug in one hand, a cigarette in another. He sat on the railing overlooking the panorama of trees and ocean and clouds below, his long legs resting in delicate parallel balance on the wooden railing. 

*We sat and talked for awhile, and then Jasper and I took a walk through backyard, which is probably the biggest and best backyard I’ve seen. We walked barefoot on a semblance of a trail, which was rocky and covered in brush and pines. We dodged trees and branches, first passing by an outhouse and compost area, and then finally arriving at Jasper’s humble abode, the Hogon.

 

*The Hogon is a one-room wooden conic shelter built by Jasper and his father. Its roof looks like a hat worn by rice paddy farmers. The base is lined with concrete, and plexiglass windows held together by a wooden skeleton fill in most of the sides, enhanced by bright tie-dye curtains and stained glass, Jasper’s handiwork. A four-minute walk from the main house, the hogon is where Jasper reads and sleeps. The glass door opens to a writing table filled with objects from another time and place–objects that seem anachronistic not because of their existence but because of the effort taken to procure them. Typewriters and oil lamps seem silly and romantic now–a luddite’s proclamation or a self-conscious aesthetic statement. But Jasper pointed out that the lack of electricity in the hogon made these objects practical, and I never doubt his earnestness, which I have known to be true since I first met him, backpacking through the Carter Mountains on the Appalachian Trail. 

 

*It’s easy to paint Jasper as a caricature, what with the cigarettes and the robe and the ornate details of his hermit existence, all of which could easily be perceived as the overwrought arrangements of a crafted, romantic life. But after knowing Jasper*** for more than four years, even the most absurd affectations that seem to play into a particular trope, are natural for him. 

*Nevertheless, I’m still puzzled and intrigued by Jasper’s effort to simplify his life so selectively. Despite the missing electricity, the limited space, and the communion with nature, the stacks of books (John Updike, poems by Louise Gluck and Emily Dickinson, The Brothers Karamazov, foreign language dictionaries, Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen), the silver goblets, and the piles of clothes on the bed betray the minimalism that this kind of lifestyle could initially suggest. In an age where we’re tethered to technology and the absence of electricity is unfathomable, the act of simplification can sometimes stem from an elaborate, self-decorative impulse. Ridding oneself of modern accoutrements often seems more difficult than just living within it all, strangely enough. Do we seek out vintage objects because of aesthetic fondness for a misplaced nostalgia? Do we abscond into the woods because it’s a romantic distraction? Are we obsessed with living out ideal lifestyles instead of figuring how to live? The former is easy and trivial, and I am certainly guilty of doing so. It’s easy to confuse minimalism with luddite living, and simplicity with certain aesthetic choices. Clearing out the noise has never felt so effortful or complicated.

***Jasper was also the subject one of my very first photo assignments in college, back in 2008. During the shoot, he smoked an entire cigar until his face turned blue.

More pictures after the jump...