Tag Archives: travel

Oct 23 2012
23 Comments
Humorous, Modern Life, San Francisco

Please Love Me

I’m looking for housing. Unfortunately, I live in San Francisco, where housing prices operate on some sort of looped scheme from the future so everything’s too expensive. In other words: it’s a long, pricey journey to find a place to rest my head.

Take a look at the first couple craigslist postings and you’ll see what I mean. One person asked me to write three paragraphs on myself just so they could consider whether or not they want me. And I did it knowing I’ll probably never hear from them. I’d have written a short story, composed a poem, or emailed them a video of me dancing. I would do whatever it takes. We all would. We are the housing seekers, and we are something less than human.

It’s not enough to have friends in the city. You need to have 800 friends in the city, and not so they can let you know if anything’s opening up in their apartment building, because there isn’t. And if there is, it’s too expensive or there’s a drug lord that lives downstairs or it’s a 20 minute walk to the nearest pharmacy and you don’t like the idea that one day you’ll have to debate letting that infection fester or walking a mile in the dark to pick up the prescription, your mind addled with fever. You need the friends so you can stay with them indefinitely, so that when one friend tires of your presence, you can move onto the next who will welcome you with open arms and a warm place for your head.

If I could say anything to the people with an empty room in their apartment out there in this city, especially if they’re closer to downtown, the Mission, or Alamo Square, I would say: please love me. I’m out here trying to make it, just like you. If it pleases you I’ll be quiet and clean, and if not I’ll be loud and messy. If you want, I’ll chat with you in the kitchen after you get home from work, maybe make you a cup of tea or offer you a cold one or a wet one if you’d prefer that. I might kiss you on the cheek, if you really need that kind of support, and I’d certainly offer to tuck you into bed at night and turn the lights out and say I love you even if I don’t mean it. I’d do that for you.

And one day, when I’m a famous author, I’ll mention you to the crowd as I accept the Pulitzer Prize for best work in science fiction humor journalism, and say that it was Cynthia Crabblestick after all who helped me be who I was today, because she let me into her home and let me pay rent and wash my dishes (and hers sometimes), and didn’t complain when I woke up early or when I was laughing by myself in my bedroom.

Thank you, Cynthia. This is for you. Let me take you out to coffee with my millions of dollars of winnings.

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Oct 08 2012
11 Comments
Serious-ish, Travelling, Writing

Oh Travel, Why Are You So Magical?

A carnival around the bend? Only one way to find out.

It’s the feeling of being between two places, a temporary state, what an ice cube feels right before it becomes liquid, where nothing I do is real and when I walk into a gas station and I know I’m on a different plane than those around me, moving in between them and above and below them but not with them, and the candy bars even taste different when I’m traveling. Tomorrow I’ll be gone, but Mr. Gorman will still be here, restocking the Snickers.

I get on a bus and go somewhere I didn’t intend to be, somewhere no one knows or expects me. I’m disrupting the time-space continuum. My body in this place wasn’t supposed to happen, but here I am. Maybe my past self, one time when I was going through the laundry room in Oklahoma, made a decision to go to Target that day and that made all the difference, so now here I am, in the present, and I’m in a city I’ve never heard of, just wandering the streets and thinking that life here is much more interesting than it actually is, feeling the world is very fragile and that gravity is the only thing holding me down.

The most exciting time of travel is on the train, when I’m not anywhere at all. I’m not in point A. I’m not in point B. I’m drinking a coffee and I am option C. This is like time that was carved out of the real world, sealed up and made into railroad cars, and in this moment I can do nothing besides travel. As the world flies by my window, maybe I’ll daydream about point B or reminisce over point A or read that book I’ve been lugging around with me. Maybe I’ll draw.

I can’t draw. I’m awful at it. The only things I can make are psychedelic doodles with rigid aesthetic rules that I don’t fully understand, so maybe I’ll do that for a while and it doesn’t matter because I don’t exist right now. My computer’s off. My phone doesn’t work in this country. My friends are on my left and my right and in front of me, so maybe the whole world is right here.

At this moment, here in the train, anything is possible. It is the moment of greatest potential. When we reach point B, we could meet a roving band of musicians, or a documentary film maker, or a group of college students who like to dress up in 80’s clothes and go out dancing on Monday nights. We might sit in a café and pay too much for coffee and remark on how fashion is or isn’t different here, and how fanny packs (bumbags) really should (or shouldn’t) come back. We might see an opera, if it’s free, or start up a conversation with a mustachioed gentleman.

Everything will happen and we’ll see fireworks and run along the canals and laugh in the sun and shade and generally agree that life has never been better.

From the train, Point B seems like paradise and ultimate freedom, which are the same.

The train makes this world possible. The in-between gives finite points meaning. Stopping makes traveling worthwhile, but the transience makes it magical.

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Sep 17 2012
7 Comments
Fiction, Humorous, San Francisco

Fake Backstories of San Francisco Neighborhood Names: The Mission

Mission Dolores and the site of the Great Carnitas Cook-off

Journey with me, if you will, back to the magical peninsula on which is situated that most unusual of cities, San Francisco, a gleaming wonder, 7×7 miles of living myths, tree huggers, dog lovers, and Banana Republic wearers.

Directly south of the city center is a sunny, burrito-scented patch known as The Mission, not A Mission, or Mission, or Mision, but “The Mission.” Its population is divided more and more evenly between feather-wearing hipsters and the more original hair-gel wearing latinos.

Dolores Park lies at the heart of The Mission, a park named for the nearby Mission Dolores, and the site from which the nearby restaurants have taken their carnitas recipes, perfected by Father Junipero Serra in the year 1779, the year of The Great Carnitas Cook-Off.

At the time of its founding in 1776, Mission Dolores was one of 18 different missions located in the city, each run by a brother of the same mother. The founders of these missions were drawn to SF because of its reputation for being a liberal lighthouse and a place where people could have a go at being themselves. In general, they disapproved of this laissez faire attitude and wanted to shut it down and end the rampant short-wearing that was going on at the time.

So 18 brothers came out to the city and each one set up his own mission, with Father Junipero Serra choosing the rather wise location of what would come to be known as The Mission—sunny and flat, it was both easy and pleasant for the friars to bike around and get their morning lattes.

Next to God, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus, the Serra brothers loved them some good carnitas. In addition to the prayers and confessionals, in each of the missions was also non-stop innovation in the realm of this delicious fried pork dish. Each week, the brothers revealed their latest carnitas creations and the parishioners would rejoice and partake.

After about a year, however, with the congregations growing and the general population feeling over-served by the well meaning but all too present Serra brothers, it became painfully obvious that 18 missions in such a small area was probably too much. The short-wearing problem was already under control, and the brothers were getting tired of meeting potential parishioners only to find they were already in attendance at their brother’s mission.

It was decided at a family meeting that only five missions were to remain open in the city, and that those missions would be chosen in a great carnitas cook-off. Each brother rushed off to their mission and began preparation for the carnitas battle.

On September 17th, 1779, the day before the contest, Father Junipero Serra prayed a mighty prayer to the Lord.

“Lord, make my carnitas an instrument of your peace. Where there is toughness, may there be tenderness, where there is dryness, may there be moisture. Lord grant that I may honor and glorify you in the carnitas cook-off, and I shall exalt your name forever and ever.”

And the Lord did hear Father Junipero’s prayer, and his carnitas that day were filled with a holy flavor that none has ever tasted the likes of since. His brothers and parishioners alike were in awe of the indescribable flavor, and rumor has it that some shouted for Junipero’s immediate sainthood upon tasting his saintly creation.

And thus his mission, Mission Dolores was named The Great Mission, and he stayed in the city along with his five favorite brothers. Over time, The Great Mission was corrupted to just The Mission, and the name was given to the area within the carnitas sway of Father Junipero.

And that was fake history. Because research takes time.

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Sep 05 2012
23 Comments
San Francisco, Travelling

I’m not a local, but then again, who is?

So cliche.

I was born in Colorado, spent three years in West Virginia, lived in Oklahoma for middle and high school, went “back east” to Boston for university, and then farther east to Egypt, and then even farther east to San Francisco.

To many people in California, Oklahoma is just as exotic as the Lost Kingdom of Thormasgurd, except no one wants to know more about Oklahoma. They assume things are radically different “out there” and they’re usually right. Sometimes they even express a fear of going to the middle place in the US because it’s a lawless, conservative backwater where people tie jackets around their waists, and I encourage this by tightening my cardigan around my middle and yelling “Yeee haw!” every time I meet someone.

I remember the first time my parents visited me at Boston University. I’d been away for all of eight weeks or less when they visited in early October, but on the way to Legal Seafood, I felt compelled to show them how city-savvy I’d become by wearing an eggplant J. Crew sweater and jaywalking, often stranding my parents on opposite sides of the street. Instead of proving myself an adroit city-dweller, I pissed off the parentals through my reckless walking behavior and ended up feeling dumb and sweating because it wasn’t cold enough to be wearing a sweater and speed walking.

Over the course of four years, and it did take me four years because I’m a slow realizer, I found that I would never be a local in Boston, that somehow my Oklahoma roots were standing out ever starker on the scalp of my collegiate experience (unwise metaphor?), and that, to my never-ending surprise, I was actually encouraging it, getting involved in things like stew-making and contra dancing and prairie-dress-wearing. While in the northern wasteland, I found comfort in identifying with a mostly mythological Oklahoma, not at all the same one I had mildly despised while growing up. The Oklahoma in my collegiate mind was something else. It was a warm fire in winter and a sense of belonging in a place where everyone was far from home.

Now in San Francisco, I’m finding the same phenomenon to be true. Though I haven’t lived in Oklahoma for roughly five years, it’s still the place I’m “from,” and I will likely be from there my entire life. In cities like San Francisco, many people are in a similar boat. Maybe not one quite as conservative or mythologically rich, but most people are not “from here.” Many are from other parts of California or other states on the West Coast, and they’ve been drawn to the hilly flame of San Francisco like hapless moths, just like I have. Quite often there’s nary a local to be found.

Being a local is a kind of rare currency in this city. It connotes intimacy with a place that so many people desire, and it’s something that can’t be bought or earned. It can only happen or be given by parents foolish enough to try to withstand the expense and private-school calculus of raising a child in the city.

I will never be a local here, no matter how asymmetrical my haircut is.  The only place I am a local is back in Oklahoma. I think that makes me a continual explorer, but it also adds the burden of creating home every place I go, but I guess that’s what we all have to do anyways. At least I’m in good company.

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Jul 13 2012
9 Comments
Humorous, Open Letters, Travelling

An Open Letter to My Reba McEntire and Brooks and Dunn T-Shirt

The real heroes.

We’ve come a long way haven’t we? I remember when you were all trussed up in wrapping paper beneath our tree. You were a Christmas gift from my big brother, and you were from a thrift store and a handful of sizes too big. When I ripped the paper off of you that sunny morning in December and saw those three pairs of eyes twinkling from the breast of the shirt, I knew I’d found a couple of buddies that would stick with me for a long while.

Oh Reba, oh Brooks and Dunn, we’ve had a lot of good times. You came with me up to Boston and we showed those people what real Americans are like. I wore you underneath a duck-patterned prairie dress to a formal party and we danced the night away, worrying only about when the music would stop, and not caring about pit stains. Life’s too short to worry about pit stains.

Now we’re here in San Francisco, another city on the bay. And I’ll be honest with you Reba, Brooks, and Dunn: I’m tired. My computer woke me up this morning at 6:30 because it was whirring so loudly, panting like a butcher on the 4th of July. A couple of hours later I went into “the city,” which is what the folks up here call “San Francisco,” and had an interview at 10 o’clock for a job that I’m not sure I even want. While on the way to the train station a young British hippy asked me if I wanted to buy an apple. He had two tiny apples in his hand and I said no and he said thanks for smiling and nice hoodie.

I wish you could have seen him. More strangers talk to me up here than most anywhere else I’ve been, but it’s not too bad. What would you do, Reba? Would you sing them a song and lift their spirits? How did you know what you wanted to do, and when you figured it out, how did you get it? Can you really have it all?

One day I’m going to have it all too, but right now I’m tired. I’m going to finish my coffee while staring at you three, your eyes sparkling back at me and then maybe I’ll get the big idea and we’ll all have to admit my brother is the genius we always knew he was.

You’re the real heroes, you the t-shirt dwellers, the silent inspirers. How many have you cheered on to victory with your never-ending mirth? No matter what the Californians say to you up here, no matter what they think of you or what kind of names they call you because you’re not from somewhere that has a San in front of it or some other liberal name, just remember that to me you are special. I love this t-shirt and am going to wear it more often so people around here can get some freaking cultural education.

I came not a moment too soon.

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