I got a visit from my friend Kirsten, along with Desmond, her five year old son, who was was very cute and whose hands were dyed blue. Desmond's hands, I mean. We had a merry old time, catching up over nutella crepes, and she told me of her adventures in Kenya, Morrocco, Senegal, Lousiana and eventually northern California. Her visit, after an absence of a decade or so of being out of touch, is sort of thematic of some of the social contacts I have lately, as I have reconnected with several people I had not been in touch with for some time since coming out here.

Which is nice, though also adds to the surreality of my experience here. It's one thing to walk around confused by the weather, but to keep having these conversations where I try and summarize the path of my life through the 90s feels sort of like a dream.

Apart from waking up every morning at 3 am when my upstairs neighbor walks around, presumably to pee, I'm sleeping a little better. I am still jumpy, and woke up last night like a character in a horror movie thinking there was a severed hand touching my face, but it turned out to just be a folded edge of a t shirt. But it sure felt like a severed hand.

I was just reading an exchange on Slate, and the quote jumped out at me "Realism, as we all know, is a special effect like any other, and authenticity is a bullshit concern." which troubles me, because authenticity is something I think about often being out here. I hope it's not for nothing and that my concerns are not bullshit.

San Francisco, as you might have heard, was effectively destroyed in the combination fire/earthquake at the beginning of the century. It was only build about fifty years before that during the Gold Rush, but almost nothing is left that is older than 100 years old. But there is still some traces of the old life, and I find myself drawn to them. For one, there is Chinatown, which was founded in the 1850s, and despite the tawdry restaurants and t shirts and cheap plastic souveniers being sold, still has a little realness left in the cracks. There is, as Chris helpfully noted in an email, the remnants of a whaling station on the west side of town, apparently the the last whaling station that was operational in all of North America, though it is currently being dismantled as an ecological risk, and the piers are being hauled away.

There is, quite uncharacteristically, a smoldering dump in a poor part of town, which periodically catches fire. I have been told it is, variously, a cool place to see art, as artists live there; a good place to get shot, as a friend of a friend did; where to hear the best music, as there are clubs there; and a place where the Navy has battled the state and city for many years about this toxic waste dump which the Navy is partially responsible for but refuses to address. It is actually a Superfund Site, for those of you old enough to even remember that quaint sounding Love Canal era term. But there is a coil of yellow-green smoke coming off the waste site, and even the most gruesome sites in Newark aren't on technicolor fire.