I returned from San Francisco last night around 11:20, after a grueling drive back along the 5. Driving there is like waking up from a wonderful dream. Driving back is the long wait of horrible anticipation before brain surgery. And it’s not just San Francisco. Any drive of four or more hours has a special quality of exquisite delight or depression. Every hour passed is a knife. It only depends on whether it’s being removed from or stuck into your flesh.
San Francisco is like no other place on earth, and you can say that even knowing full well it’s exactly the same as every other place on the planet because it is global, in the same way that Siberia and the Solomon Islands and Antarctica are global, in the same way that people are global, no longer confined to their little plot. San Francisco keeps a person looking straight ahead, always toward the water, always toward the setting of the western sun.
This week promises to be interesting, though that usually doesn’t translate to the blog very well, for reasons which I am about to elucidate. Generally my life is easily graphable, following a line which resembles a desert hovering along the asymptotal horizon, which implies not an excess of things which might be put into memoirs, unless memoirs were suddenly redefined to writing about the life of someone whose very existence is less interesting than that of a fuzzy caterpillar. And it’s true, let’s face it. Caterpillars go through incredible transformation a short time after being born, becoming something nature hardly has words to describe for sheer complex beauty. Meanwhile, I’ve been in Los Angeles a year, and I still have the same two pair of shorts I brought out with me. Wear them constantly.
But it’s not the kind of thing that sells books.
Nevertheless, I figured I could take this week to discuss two milestones, one being my birthday tomorrow, and the second being an LA resident for a year on August 9. I’m sure that sounds like the beginnings of a maudlin look back at the past year, with fruitless pondering of what I could have done differently, what things have occurred to bring me to this point in life, blah blah blah. Please shoot me in the head if I start doing that. I’d hate to write it more than as much as you’d hate to read it.
No, what I would like to do is make this a hilarious, E! Hollywood True Stories kind of looking back, where secrets are revealed, photos are taken, and lawyers gather like vultures to sue each other’s clients because the picking gets so vicious. In short, I want to say exactly what I’ve been wanting to say all this time, but needed a year in which to establish residency, so as not to taint what I have to say with the hint of illegitimacy. Now that I’ve been here long enough, my words might have some weight. Just not as much as anyone who’s been here longer than me. But that’s the advantage of having a forum. People tend to listen if you shout loud enough. Even if they’re just rubberneckers trying to catch a glance at the crazy guy on the corner shouting weird things and wearing no pants. So watch and wait, people. There’s good stuff a’coming.
Oh, and by the way, in case you were wondering, yes. You did just spend five minutes reading something with absolutely zero content value. I’m kind of like the LA Times that way.
See you tomorrow.