My romantic life

Today, having finished my morning work shift, for the first time I don't have to dread going home. That's because yesterday evening a friend came over with a rented minivan and helped me move out of the Richmond district flat where I have spent the last month in a state of hostile limbo and into a residential hotel that is going to be my home for the next month or three while I set about rebuilding my life here in San Francisco. It ain't much, but it's mine, and at this point all I want is a little independence, four walls and a roof of my own, until I determine my next more permanent living arrangement - and some permanence in life (and employment) is my main goal at this point.

This city, and the Bay Area in general, have thrown an awful lot at me since I moved here not so long ago (was it really only last September?), but as of this writing, I'm still standing, and I must admit I take a certain pride in surviving the latest in the seemingly endless minefield of setbacks that life (the universe, God, providence, kismet, quantum physics, whathaveyou) has strewn across my path since leaving what looks in retrospect like the womblike and embyronic candy-land of Portland. By the time my time inside the Golden Gate is through, I'll be able to write a book called How to Survive in San Francisco Starting From Absolute Scratch, with the subtitle Despite Moving Here on the Spur of the Moment, Knowing No One, Being Unfamiliar with the Area and Renting a Room Sight-Unseen Over the Phone, Being Mugged at Gunpoint in Oakland, Losing My Job, Being Unemployed and without Income For Nearly Three Months (with Absolutely No Savings), Moving In with a Dishonest and Sexually Inappropriate Maniac, and Being Forced to Apply for Food Stamps and Government Assistance Because I was on the Verge of Being Homeless.

Compared to all that, my life right now - as of last night - seems downright romantic to me, romantic not in the Danielle Steele sense, but in the "starving artist scraping by in the big city, just starting his adult life," novelistic way. I got to eat breakfast and lunch at work this morning, and took home leftovers which I will warm up in the microwave for dinner. I made some tips and got my first paycheck this morning, which I deposited in my checking account, now slowly recovering from my recent depressing dip into total indigence. The building I live in is pretty much equidistant between Chinatown, North Beach and the Financial District - a lively and exhilarating place to spend a month or two while I start over again on a new footing. This evening I will arrange things in my room (including two plants I brought with me - a jade plant and a spider plant - because they're the closest thing I have to a pet right now, and I regard them with the affection usually reserved for sentient creatures), watch a little TV, read - I'm in the middle of five biographies right now: of Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, President Obama, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Cocteau - and make sure I have all my dates and appointments accurately recorded in my planner. I will get a good night's sleep, wake up before the sun tomorrow, take a shower, and get ready for another day of work, and whatever else may happen after - which is really anything, at this point.

Infinite possibility and no one to answer to but myself makes Tony a happy tiger.

VOTE FOR THE 2010 NEWNOWNEXT AWARDS!

VOTE FOR THE 2010 NEWNOWNEXT AWARDS!

Back when it was real, man

Overheard today in San Francisco: Young, scruffy rocker dude, on the sidewalk near Union Square, tells a random group of tourists, "I saw the Stones in concert back in '94, man!" Points to a 20-something tourist girl and says, "You weren't even alive then!" Then his voice trailing after him down the sidewalk: "Those were the REAL days, man! Back when it was REAL!!"

Community Quilt

I'm really gaining appreciation for how San Francisco is like a patchwork quilt, each swatch its own different design (district, 'hood), sewn together into such a magnificent whole. I've been educated about the "microclimates" here - how it may be cold and overcast in the Richmond where I live, but all you gotta do is hop over into Eureka Valley (Castro) and it's sunny delight. It IS sort of like Portland on a large scale, only far more diverse racially and culturally - and meteorologically.

Do I sound like Terence McKenna here?

Here's a weird feeling I had the other day: I was eating some horseradish cheese, but didn't know that, 'cause I was eating pieces of 3 different cheeses and absentmindedly thought i was eating the white cheddar instead. I swear the cheese tasted like cheddar until I thought, "Wait, this is the horseradish," at which point ... it tasted like what it really was - horseradish. It was like the ultra high tech hologram equipment that projects what we think of as "reality" was delayed for a second

The best argument yet for passing health care reform...

Rush Limbaugh will leave the country if it passes!

No pigs were harmed in the posting of this blog entry.

Woolf the monk and Clooney the drunk

Part of me still finds the Academy Awards a nauseating, insular clique of overly privileged mutual admirers...but I'm glad The Dude finally won his Best Actor Oscar (of all those nominated for Best Picture, I most want to see Crazy Heart), and that a female director finally won. Just one question: was George Clooney super drunk, or what?

On an unrelated note, I was recently reading about Virginia Woolf and how those who visit her former home, Monk's House in Rodmell (photo above) - now open to the public as a museum - are surprised to find how small and unadorned her bedroom was, her narrow single bed, and how equally bare-bones her writing lodge, located through the garden, was as well. Lisa Williams in Letters To Virginia Woolf writes of the "chaste and monastic life" Woolf led that allowed her to get so much transcendental writing done. It made me think one day - I've had the this fantasy-future glimmering in the back of my mind for a long time - I will have to leave the city, leave technology behind, and be like Woolf, or Thoreau, go out in the woods, live in a cabin, relinquishing all my material possessions, in order to accomplish writing the great novel or book or whatever it may be that I feel lurking brilliantly yet unobtainably in the depths of my soul and psyche. That was sort of the idea in going to work in Glacier Park a couple summers ago, but it didn't turn out that way. Work ate my summer, and sharing a tiny room with three other guys made that sort of solitude impossible.

The so-called Bloomsbury Group influenced my attitudes, values, and personality a lot at a formative age. Too bad the literary upper middle class they belonged to has all but disappeared. Still, I consider them spiritual predecessors and want to carry on their talent for enduring friendships that last a lifetime. That seems to be harder than ever in a modern urban setting especially, but I'm determined.

On another unrelated note, it just so happens that I appeared (briefly) on channel 2 KTVU news last night here in the Bay Area! They were filming a segment on the LGBT Community Center in San Francisco while i happened to be there perusing the job listings. A friend of mine found the media clip online, if you want to check it out.

Cheers!

glam