And with that came the depression. A huge tidal wave of despair. The horizon line was lost, the sky barricaded, the ground a gaping sink hole. I know me and I know my patterns. I've known that in this space, typically I just have to count real slowly for just a few days and the panic will disappear.
This time, not so much.
Could it be the malaise of my birthday? The shitty weather? My perpetual state of poverty? An existential crisis?
I've been working on a massive painting problem for a few weeks now, resulting in hours and hours of experimentation, and though I understand that at least 75% of what I produce will only result in garbage, it's agonizing being surrounded by a never-ending avalanche of failures. On top of that, those countless hours stuck alone, in my head, only wreak havoc on any stability I may have had.
In those bouts, I go outside. In the past, I would have gone to the Attic for an hour or two and been immediately socially righted, but now, it's a struggle to find the right place to go. I spend a lot of time in the park, alone, or on my roof - these further alienating my already lonely self. But when I do meet with friends, the same diatribe begins, "Fuck the techies", "Man, I can't wait for Burning Man to finally get the City back, if only for one week," "Are you kidding me? The Burners rented out their pads for Air BnBs? So we still don't have any parking?" "San Francisco has no culture anymore, it's been sucked dry."
We turn onto the corner of 24th and Mission, and the protest has already begun. He wants to linger, to see what's coming around the corner. I see twelve motorcycle cops and my reaction is to get as far away as possible. "We support the United Farm Workers of America and other classes." Two girls hold up a poster, "Class War 2.0"
If one more fire truck goes by my bedroom in the next ten minutes, I might punch my own window out of the frame.
You can always tell when I'm really depressed when I start sleeping, and I mean sleeping. In healthy days, I average four-six hours a night. Miserable, ten-fourteen. And then, those strange salt bubble things that people call tears start popping in my eyes at the most random moments.
During one of these common rants about how much this city sucks, we were driving down the street. I saw this hand-painted sign for an old taqueria, the sign clearly having been painted at least forty years ago. On the radio was some old school jazz, his pork pie hat pulled down low on his brow, and goddamn those stupid salt bubbles resurfaced.
There's an old film from the fifties of Jack Kerouac standing on some SF corner, and due to the combination of age, light and artistic sensibilities, the images are bathed in this ice cold blue. I wanted to cry, to scream, to mourn, how I'll never walk through North Beach in the middle of the night, collar turned against the wind, pockets full of drugs, a rhythm in my step, a lone trumpet setting the melody for my melancholy. I would never gather at some small diner at four in the morning to continue the night's adventures. I'd never descend the dingy cement steps into a rat infested cave where some cats are playing their hearts out by candlelight.
And with depression, once the door opens, there's no desire to stop the flood of self-torment. Why would I just bemoan not living during the Beat generation? Why not mourn the end of Victorianism, the death of the cowboy, the crashing halt of the '80s?
It made me almost unbearably sad to know that I will never again hear the sound of metal can toppled by a cat in the middle of the night. Or that no one will ever make me a mix-tape again. I am a dinosaur, in that I still practice carrying a sketch pad, a notebook, I insist on writing down my phone number rather than texting it to someone, and yet I'll still never leave home without my smart phone. I am as guilty as all the others for 'documenting' my experience, rather than just experiencing it.
With my back to the construction in the Mission, I fixed my gaze on Sutro, watching the fog tumble over it in a never-ending struggle to extricate itself from the rest, a small tendril floating this way and that, only to be consumed, regained by the mass at large again. When I was in my early twenties, I had a terrible bout with depression, a struggle that lasted maybe seven years. The only thing that got me through it was the long list of lies I would tell myself each morning. I would create some small goal to achieve for the day, a particular flower to seek out, a beautiful new thing to contemplate, a reason to seek a new friend. And though I didn't believe in any of those things at the time, nor cared, it forced me out of bed and back into the world. As I sat on the roof, watching the morphing fog, I felt the dam of serotonin open again.
Though my place in this world, in this city, in small and lonely, it's my little place, and it's perfect. It's as if all those years of lying to myself in order to keep going had manifested itself in strange objects, small tools. My room has become an outer extension of my internal battle with my demons. Walking back into my room that night, I knew that there was no way anything bad could touch me here.
And then, two other quintessential San Francisco things happened, in the nick of time, to eradicate these blues.
The first was the earthquake.
On a personal note, I find it cruel and ignorant when people make light of earthquakes, calling it a free roller-coaster ride, or making glib of the earth moving. I was here in '89. I watched the news with horror, while the firefighters pulled rubble off of people who had been buried for days. I watched the footage of third floor apartments jettisoned off their buildings, the bridge breaking, the ground mutilating itself. Like we know, I was a very sensitive child; I still don't have the capability to separate myself from the sufferings of others, of things.
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And though I find it callous and disgusting to make jokes that earthquakes might scare the techies away from living here, in my heart of hearts, I hope it to be true.
Each location in the world creates and demands a behavior of its residents. We are all subject to our microclimates. Old school Portlanders have a strange chip on their shoulder from the countless days of bleakness, a thing which imbeds itself deep inside of us, tinting our lenses to that particular palette. In San Francisco, we have the wind and the fog, but more than that, we have the uncertainty of stability at least always in the backs of our minds.
A few days prior to the earthquake, I was reading an article in the NY Times about the uniqueness of architectural progress in San Francisco. Compared to NYC, SF doesn't have any architecture-stars; we have very few famous buildings, a thing considered strange in the global perspective since we are the seat of cutting edge. Even the Transamerica building, built over forty years ago, received a lot of flak from residents.
"Today it stands mostly alone in a city more interested in conserving its old Victorian style homes than in making a statement with new development. It is a puzzling phenomenon in a part of the country often seen as an engine of American innovation."
What is being developed are these hideous, soulless box-structure things, eye-sores in all directions. "More than the pedigree of the architect, the city worries about things like shadows and wind and, of course, earthquakes."
Did you know that to build in this city, at least 15% of the cost goes towards seismic readiness? And that the foundations have to go 100-150 feet deep?
An architect who had been hired to build a 37 story building on Van Ness and Market met with massive resistance from the city. Because of the natural wind corridor there, the building they had proposed threatened to lift pedestrians off the street, making them airborne. "We had never heard of these kinds of wind regulations. It became almost obsessive on the planning board's side to make sure the wind is mitigated." -Mr. Karpf, the architect hired.
To put it in perspective, the 1906 earthquake resulted in $24 million in damages, $350 million in fire damage, and 498 deaths in San Francisco proper.
Loma Prieta resulted in 3000 deaths, leaving 225,000 homeless, and is the United States' natural disaster to gain the largest relief to date.
Thankfully, this earthquake was nothing in comparison, but it did act as a humbling reminder. This city, this neighborhood, is built on little support and our fate here is just as unpredictable.
The second thing to fix my mood happened on Tuesday. Having met the girls in North Beach for afternoon beers, I sat quietly in the corner. The tourist buses scaled down Columbus like a whale migration. The sun was out and yet it didn't feel festive. I tried to smile though my frown lines were getting more comfortable with their tug on my face. I asked quietly, "Can we go to the Saloon?"
The oldest bar in the city smells disgusting, like a very old, very full baby diaper. The regulars look like they came with the bar. But the five of us grabbed seats at the end, were given free gummy worms from this nice gentleman, and suddenly, there was a blues duo playing in the corner. The rest of the party left, save my one friend who is also going through her own personal hell. The music came.
She and I both grew up in bars listening to blues, a strange point of kinship to find in such an unlikely friendship. And here it was! No, my collar was not turned up against the wind. It wasn't the middle of the night and I didn't have a pocket full of drugs, but this was quintessential San Francisco. The singer assumed we were tourists as we were the youngest people in the bar by about thirty years, but once corrected, they were pleased to be singing only to locals.
I can't articulate just how saddening it is to watch the overhaul of the Mission. The speed, the magnitude, the sheer insult of actually having to push a techie out of a doorway because they (this particular person) doesn't seem to understand the concept of entrance/exit. The bitterness in me rises, emitting a hideous, sarcastic laugh. How stupid can this possibly get?
In 1637, tulipomania struck the Dutch Golden Age. People had become so obsessed with tulips, the flower, that its demand reached astronomical levels. "At the peak of tulip mania, in March 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman. It is generally considered the first recorded speculative bubble".
Naturally, unsustainable, this burst the economy, ruining much of Dutch commerce.
As pretty as San Francisco may seem to the outsiders that are changing its core, I believe that either they will grow tired of it, find it too far changed to no longer desire it, or the city may itself just reject them. The true San Franciscan, to me, has the wind in their heart, the fog in their mind, the earthquake in their fear, and the history in their soul. We are more a part of this city than it's businesses and ugly new housing developments. We are the the ones to sit in the dark holes on sunny afternoons to listen to old blues.
When bemoaning nostalgia, she pointed out, "Do you actually think that all of our cultural heroes knew at the time, that they were living in a golden age?" Who's to say we aren't currently laying the groundwork for a new cultural revolution?
Some of my favorite San Francisco photos for you:
