Learn From It

Yesterday was not an easy day. Productive, a bit, and destructive, more than a bit. It more or less ended with me grabbing my helmet and getting the hell out of the house Dodge for a while.

There is a certain flying feeling when you're on a motorbike. That goes double and wonky when it's a Vespa. You're seated more or less upright. Both feel planted on a supporting, flat surface, knees protected and handlebars sufficiently flat to remove themselves from view.

Add to that a very long and curving and unbroken road through Golden Gate Park, late enough in the day where mottled sunlight interrupts the pavement and blurs the curblines and it's nearly cinematic in its removement. Only the loud clacking and choking sputter of a two-stroke engine keeps you grounded—and not even then. Inurement turns the sputter and clack into a sort of rattle and hum that soothes.

Before I made my way through Golden Gate Park towards Ocean Beach, I stopped in the Castro. Stopped at the drug store there for tools of an armature I needed around myself for this solo flight: a notebook, three packs of index cards and a good pen.

I arrived at Ocean Beach as the sun was low in the sky, a headlight unable to keep pace with the Earth's escape into night.

I'd also ended up on Twin Peaks, briefly, after deciding against stopping at the too-convivial Canvas Gallery or the too-elidable cafes of the Castro and Duboce Triangle.

Thoughts that go to ink and paper are different to those which fly through fingertips into the light. I can go to explanations both physiological and logistical, but fuck that noise, as we used to say: it is what it is, and off we go.

2005.08.27 — Ocean Beach

The Sea is for the Nothing Special.

Too much of too few things: mundane. Too many creatures of too many varieties: bewildering.

Too much water and too much—far too much—air.

Sand is nothing except where the endless ends, the perimeter around the too-much.

The gulls scavenge and shit, filthy creatures who get away with their excesses and excuses because there's so much to scavenge and so many places to shit.

And a too-willing Sea, green and complicitous, ready to swallow the evidence and chalk it up to Nature.

When the Sea offers, It's just who I am!, remember that the tiger does not hate the gazelle and the fly can do nothing but accept the spider as a fact of life and a feature of Nature, as we might a hurricane or an earthquake.

Sand does not attempt to hinder the gait, it just wasn't designed for it or for anything.

Or perhaps the sand is too forbearing, too accommodating, too open, too bending and too giving to be forgiving.

[I would miss San Francisco if I were not still in it.]

It's too easy to slip into Forever near the Sea, and too often too painful to slip back out of it and be reminded that Forever lasts longer than you will.

If I stayed?

Would the Sea keep me in Forever?

Or would it take me away and swallow all evidence of me when I could no longer stand as a rampart, no longer balance on inert-but-strange sands and even stranger waters?

Obsidian Depths and silicated Oblivion are Forevers as well, from a certain perspective.

[Old Albert—he and I would have been fast friends, Forever friends.]

The Sea is cold—apologies to D.H.—no matter the heat of the life within it. No one can dismiss the chill.

The chill of the Nothing Special.

•••

2005.08.27 — Twin Peaks (later)

Filmic sky, both pastel and metallic. Odd.

I am Adam Hoskins in Chapter Two, but in my world, it's far too cold and no one's gawking.

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