Terra Firma

October 3, 2008

(downtown San Francisco, having stayed two nights with a friend in Palo Alto and preparing to spend many more nights with a friend in the East Bay town of Dublin)

I walked for nine or ten hours, north, south, east, and west, to the Mission, to Bernal Heights, to Russian Hill, to Fisherman’s Wharf. Toward evening, deciding food was necessary to prevent the embarrassment of some sort of fainting incident, I bought a burrito from a greasy little shop that smelled of limes. I was sitting on a bench eating it when dusk began to climb up from the edges of the sky, summoning with it sadness and bewilderment, for the dark made me think that I ought to be getting home. Then I remembered that, at the moment, I had no home. I would sleep at R’s house tonight, but I was not magnetized to that point. The compass in my chest spun wildly.


October 5. 2008

(Dublin)

A bad day. No one will hire me. No one will rent me an apartment. Amidst the hordes of educated, ambitious, young people out to have their way with San Francisco, I am unremarkable, if not invisible. This city is too big, too hungry, too heavy for my hopes to survive in it.

Wasn’t the west coast the place where a particularly American magic was alchemized? The destination of the Gold Rush; the lode star of transcontinental railroad endeavors; the home of Hollywood; the haven of revolutionaries, visionaries, and eccentrics; the epicenter of the dot.com boom and land of Silicon Valley; that crucible of innovation, in which the opposing pressures of the mountains and the ocean forced the human mind to a high pitch of ecstasy? Why then does it feel to me like the reef upon which my particular American dream is dashed?


October 10, 2008

(after my second day of work as a canvasser, stopping people on the street and trying to convince them to give me their credit card information for the sake of destitute children in third world countries)

I have met many friendly tourists, commiserated with a few beggars, teased some businessmen, and not sealed the deal even once. In two days I have received more dirty looks than the average person probably receives in a year.

There is much encouragement from my three peppy co-workers, a clique of young women who are, much to their advantage in this line of work, fluent in inanity. Despite their intervention, I am sort of enjoying myself. My fear diminishes. I am becoming inured to rejection, to disdain, to contempt. You build up your resistance doing this. My Hapkido instructor in Minneapolis told me about something called the iron shirt, which comes of taking many blows to the body. Your flesh becomes harder, and you feel less pain when it is struck. The iron shirt I have been making for my mind these past two days both gratifies and unsettles. I am gaining a new power with which to get my hands into life and take the good stuff, but I am also dulling a sensitivity, and therefore one view into the heart of life has dimmed. What I mean is, I can survive the hostility (or, worse, low esteem) of other people, because I have shut my mind against wondering about them; I have stopped thinking about what they are thinking. What caused me to fear other people was also what awed me: the workings of the hidden mind, which, though held forever separate from mine, must be somehow kindred.


October 12, 2008

(Dublin)

Saturday was a reprieve. J, A, and I sat for hours in a coffee shop in Palo Alto. We remembered Bennington together, reciting the old stories – incantations, I felt, to summon the protection of the past against the uncertainty lapping at the edges of that day.

Later, we drove out of town, parked in a certain spot A knew, and hiked among the redwoods in the dusk of their shade. There was a coldness and stillness, as though we trod a valley of the ocean floor. A coyote paused as he climbed a hill, catching sight of three other small creatures astir at the feet of the trees. He resumed his climb but turned back again and again to stare.

We returned to the car and drove further, in order to reach a view that A and J had visited three months ago. We wound around hills burnt to golden straw, in which the dark, sere trees seemed to wade. The sun was once again upon us, the light thickening with evening and getting caught between blades of grass and in the edges of leaves and in the very air. We reached the top of a hill where stood a single, gnarled oak and under it a bench. We sat, looking out over the hills to the bay, and A used his pocket knife to cut up apple. He gave a piece to J, then a piece to me, then a piece to himself, and again until it was eaten up. We were silent. I climbed the tree. Before we left, A took pictures of J and me standing together in front of the view – looking into the distance, looking at him, looking at each other.

On Sunday J and I dashed around the city visiting apartments, yelling in to our phones, muttering curses at the incessant Fleet Week flyovers, and in general feeling harried by San Francisco, which was hot, loud, and full. When night finally fell, we drove back to Palo Alto. The lights of the city lay in the dark hills like iridescent beads held in the folds of an apron.


October 13, 2008

(after my third day as a canvasser)

During my second break, J called to tell me that we had the Ingleside apartment and could sign the lease tomorrow. That meant, blessedly, that I could quit my job. (We had found that we needed employment in order to secure an apartment. Good credit scores would also have been helpful.)

I could fail. It was time to fail. Then fate did me a bad turn and put a very sweet, very accommodating young man in my way. He probably would have said yes to a fund providing body-image therapy to ugly cats. Starving children were a shoe-in. He put me at one sign-up in three days and saved me from getting fired at the end of the shift, redeeming me and dooming me to try once more tomorrow. Says the man in Moore’s “Pangolin,”

“Again the sun!”


October 14, 2008

(having just signed the lease)

Oh, screw it. I quit.