The Opposite Of Messy

aka Love Letter to San Francisco

I landed in San Francisco in August 2002, trading the balmy desert heat and an ocean you could swim in without a wetsuit for a concrete box at SF State (which we dubbed Daly City State, so far was it from anywhere any of us actually wanted to be, far enough that it didn’t even feel like we had arrived, at all), cute in my vintage cowl-neck sweater and fancy winter coat I’d bought the week before at Burlington Coat Factory with my mom, who later told me no one thought I’d make it past the first semester, such a sun worshipper was I, perpetually tan, always wearing as minimal clothing as possible. It indeed was cold and miserable, though I would never have admitted that to anyone other than my friends and my journal and all the other people living in the dorms from LA and Orange County, which were most of us. I was eighteen, a virgin, a pothead, eyes full of stars about living in The City and finally having the kind of life I’d been fantasizing about all through high school. Everyone was talking about the dot-com-boom-and-bust, Muni cost fifty cents—thirty-five cents for students and seniors—and I was so clueless and stoned all the time I once thought Sutro Tower was the Golden Gate Bridge. The first year of living here was Amoeba Music on Haight Street to see free shows of bands and singers and deejays whose names I rarely knew but pretended to when cool new friends invited me along, making dozens of fake i.d.’s and having them confiscated just as often, gliding my way through college making mostly A’s even though now looking back I can hardly remember a thing. I had a fabulous wardrobe from selling clothes at Crossroads Trading Co. on Fillmore for $9/hour, there was no Uber or Lyft so riding around the city on a bicycle still felt safe, and I was so young and reaching so hard and absolutely overflowing with a pervasive but ever intangible and totally overwhelming sense of want I didn’t know what to do with until, like, two years ago. 

I lasted longer than that first semester; come August, I’ll have been here as long as I haven’t. Eighteen years—perfect, really, since this city grew me up, since I’m only recently feeling like I can stake any sort of claim in the Land of Adulthood (hashtag sobriety). I have two degrees and a bunch of certifications in everything from massage therapy, to yoga, to teaching English as a second language, to CrossFit, to health coaching, but despite the degrees and those other expensive pieces of paper I would never actually hang on any wall, my greatest education was roaming these curvy streets and impossible hills and living with countless Craigslist housemates, some of whom to this day are my dearest friends, others whom I would avoid if I saw them on the street. 

San Francisco is a city you live in during a particular phase of life. Maybe you’re young, and wild, and reckless, and still believe enough in your art that you justify living off burritos and cheap booze and work trades in order to access the things you love, and so you live in apartments with roaches and mice and asshole roommates but also, cheap rent, and you want to focus on your art but really all you develop is a talent for tolerating all the things your parents warned you to avoid. You walk everywhere. You walk, because not only can you not afford a cab, but this was pre-Uber, remember, when Yellow Cab would put you on hold for three months or, if you were lucky, promise you a cab that often never came, and hailing one like they do in New York wasn’t something that ever actually happened, and those low late nights where you simply had to cough up the cash to get home finding a cab felt like a miracle. Or maybe it was too late to catch a cab, so you’d hitchhike up and down Market Street, or walk from Mid-Market through the N-Train tunnel to get home to Upper Haight late night when Muni stopped running, or maybe you were tired, so you tried waiting for The Owl line to pick you up which ultimately meant walking, more. You still remember the days of brass bands up and down Mission Street, or when mariachi’s roamed around the neighborhood and might be persuaded to walk up the three flights of stairs to serenade your housemate on her birthday, and that one holiday season where someone strung mistletoe on every single intersection of Valencia, and so people were just kissing, kissing, kissing. 

Or maybe your phase is education and getting your professional legs under you and dating and happy hour-ing and grad schooling until you eventually meet someone you can put up with enough to marry and make babies with and inevitably move back to your hometown or to San Leandro or Marin if you’re fancy or of course, Portland. Or maybe your phase is a Silicon Valley phase, this most recent phase, and you come here and you make a shit load of money, enough money to go do something else where all that money goes farther (further?), and as you leave you do your best to not to let the door hit you on the way out.

Or maybe your phase is you don’t know where the fuck else to go and you come here because even people like you are welcome in this town, and so you muddle along and before you knew it, The City went and grew you up, and despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, she loves you more than she doesn’t and so you set down roots and you stay.

Right now, my city is shut down. A couple of nights ago around sunset I drove through the Mission, up Valencia Street, which, when I first moved to the neighborhood, still was full of empty lots and abandoned storefronts but in the past ten years has been made-over into a sort of Disneyland for grownups, and it was so quiet, and almost all the shops and bars and restaurants were boarded up. San Franciscans love to complain about San Francisco but in that moment my heart got stuck, because I don’t want boards up anywhere in my city, just like I don’t want the six feet I’ve had to place between myself and my neighbors.

I am dreaming of the days we took for granted.

San Francisco bore witness to me, to all of it, more than any friend, or lover, or family member, more than anyone else except perhaps for my dog, who knows me in a way that a human cannot. San Francisco filled me up until I was able to fill myself up. She gave me all my lessons. She forgave me my blackouts and bad decisions, for putting my foot in my mouth countless times, and for all the times I said yes when everything in me was screaming NO. She forgave my messiness.

Things are messy again. Next level messy. And it appears we will be lingering here a while.

Sometimes, the truth only reveals itself in retrospect. We need space and distance before we can look back and see with any clarity how the things we went through shaped who we are now. The decades of fumbling my way around this town, and then waking up to certain things that I’d become expert at ignoring, taught me my greatest lesson, greater than any other, a lesson that would have been helpful to learn in junior high or high school (along with comprehensive sex-ed and history that wasn’t whitewashed), that is: How to be resilient. How to keep going. How to stay, how to not run. Which, yeah, is coming in handy now.

At the beginning of this pandemic season I saw a meme running around that said something like: “Did anyone else feel like they were just starting to get their life together, and now this?” It is head spinning to me now that just a few months ago I believed such a thing was even possible. And to be disabused of this notion on a collective level? At such lightning speed? To see the way we are already adapting to a new truth, a new reality free of illusion? I am breathless.

San Francisco’s history—and current reality, even pre-pandemic—is problematic, has always been problematic as hell. Our history is one of genocide, of earthquakes and fires and ruin, of racism, and omnipresent economic disparity, of corruption. San Francisco is a place defined by mess. But she’s also characterized by mess’s opposite, which is beauty, and order, and yeah, resilience.

There’s another word here, swimming around my imagination, a word that might ease us through and perhaps out of this mess, a word that at its very center has another word inside, and that other word is life, and the word I’m thinking of is revival.

Hi friends. How you holding up? Thanks again for subscribing. Feel free to forward this to whomever you like, and feel even more free to encourage others to subscribe, or post screenshots if you want. xodani