Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

Drove eastward, the ocean at my back, shining in the rearview mirror. It was not quite the point of no return, but more like a self-initiated sunset, because at some point soon again I will return.

Spent the day up the coast. Very windy. The dharma birds simply float in the air, expending just enough energy to not go anywhere. I can't tell why. Do they not want to get ahead and go somewhere, find food, etc. like the rest of the rats below? Or do birds just enjoy floating and flying aimlessly? There was an info sign about a bird that migrates 64,000 km. Birds come in all sorts it seems.

The city is, for me, like a memory-thing. Something that helps you remember. Driving today through pasture was like the landscape in southeast Georgia, rolling, with a lone road cutting through. The coast, with rough winds, sandy beaches, and surfers reminded me of southwest Melbourne, by Torquay. Trees, bent by the incessant winds, like natural bonzai trees, are like those that line Beach Drive in Victoria. Grant St., at the gates of Chinatown, feels like it could be on the foothills of Montmartre. And yet the overall canvas is like another version of Vancouver - the bridge, the trolley busses, the coastline. What does one call the place that is not home, though it feels just like it, as if this version happened because of all the particular what-ifs that came to be. As if there was a recipe, and it turned out this way instead of that.

As I walk along the beach, I find that there are few landmarks to help gauge how far I am going. The surfers and gliders keep moving, the joggers go back and forth, cartwheeling kids ramble around. The wind covers the steps I take, as if they don't matter, as if I had never come. Wind, and/or windiness, is so Buddhist. There's nothing to it! Two windmills in the distance, but like the dharma birds, they curiously don't move.

North Beach Girl

Finished off a sacripantina (sacred bread? No, 'rogue')) and a good coffee at El Greco, which, like my Main St Bean, also has taken over the adjacent parking spots for coffeeing. Swedish has a verb for having a coffee (fika), high time we did too. Lots of streets here named after 'Gen Beat' writers. Again, we have a few, and we ought to start renaming our piece of the planet too. 'Interior Geographies' was the title of a book at City Lights, surely our crust could care less if we embossed it with value deserved of our artists, writers etc rather than others who barely touched (or, equally, touched by) our city streets?

A female, and Japanese theme emerging in this trip. Under my phone, on which I am tapping tapping tapping, is a used book I picked up, a novel on the brides coming from Japan to be married to Japanese men here in California. It seems that covering one's mouth when giggling is the thing to do. I really can't imagine doing that; surely the last natural thing to do for me. But them were the days. Maybe their teeth were bad? In any case I saw big cuffs in front of mouths, this foreign, other-timely age of feminine shyness, depicted in a geisha exhibit yesterday. Is it seductive to be shy? Probably. But shy architects won't get too far in the love of their life.

In the Beat Museum, there's a healthy section of Playboy magazines, the covers of which were pretty tame as tabbies before the 70s. Market demand (changed since?) or Beat Gen liberation leading towards more of the right kind of flesh on covers? There's a couple of panels on women in the Beat Gen. Women were otherwise burnt at the stake if they were, well, like a Beat poet.

Who knows what it's like to be authentically feminine and Beat. We're 'tired and have had it with' ... gosh where to begin. In the geisha exhibit, there is a video of a man acting as a geisha, in 'The Wisteria [something]', doing the most feminine body moves, with an expressionless, dead-log face. I walk around town like the protagonist in DR/SVT 'Broen', a no-nonsense stride - a strategy for accessing the city, particularly in the dicey areas. For what to do, when asked 'Hey, weren't you on tv the other night?' but simply walk on? Beat women seemed to simply serve as the necessary accessories of complex and/or open relationships.

Certainly the Beat walking tour I was on could have benefited from putting ideas into practice. Let me not know where they lived, and wrote, and played. Give me two hours of feeling what it was like to feel painfully, daringly liberated, like they did, from, say, the constraints of a two-hour set walking tour that I booked and prepaid days ago.

Enjoy the full moon tonight, in libra, in liberation of inbalance.

Hello, SFO

Received a personal in-room welcome by a hotel staff member, having lunch in the room. Well, I've checked in early. And it is perhaps a good sign, that she chose to be in 'my' room. Quiet and sunfilled now at noon, a perfect room with cheery yellow walls, candy cane striped drapes, and turquoise fleur de lis carpet. And how nice it is to see a bed freshly made.

First things first. Off for some yemeni nosh.