this freehand pen and ink drawing is available for purchase, with free shipping in the USA. $50, a chunk of which goes to the San Francisco Homeless Prenatal Program (www.homelessprenatal.org).
UPDATE: SOLD
ARBOR COFFEE
OAKLAND, CA 14:15PM
San Francisco wasn’t ever a home. At one point in a state of sophomoric euphoria, I convinced myself I would die here, but now I am so grateful that I will not. I don’t even want to be buried here. It would be an insult to both myself and to the City by the Bay.
San Francisco is not a real city.
It is an arbitrary idea come to life.
It is a living, breathing entity that dwells in a dreamlike realm when things are great, but descends into an unfathomable nightmare when expectations disassociate from reality.
My idea of City life was an explosive tapestry spread across a thousand fucked up wonderful moments with a neon rainbow gallery cast of characters. They, in turn, were all living their own collection of hyper-romanticized urban cannon fodder… Violently strange and wonderful livelihoods shot out of primordial womb cannons fueled by pure id, adrenaline, and 1,000 lost field notes of failed attempts to determine the right amount of both.
Everyone comes here with pitch perfect ideals as their Golden Gates fling wide open and plunge them deep into a lost expedition. They chomp at the bit for all the secret handshakes and smoky back alleys filled with impulse surrender and sensual oblivion. Wicked smiles and cosmic orgasms. Chance encounters with deceptively beautiful souls who will rip their hearts out and slam them into the breakers out west among the seals and sharks. They play all the glossiest midway games, fully consenting to snake oil sales pitches set against a backdrop of concrete circus tents full of utter madness, devoid of respite or logic or reason.
They are all shiny, chrome marbles slipping in and out of dusty black holes in an infinite labyrinth. Every lost number and tarnished outer shell returns them to the beginning, and they all scramble to reinvent their paths in hopes of reaching that warm center where their life can feel complete within the City to which they give so much of their energy.
Some stay and keep trying, desperate to earn their keep and rank. Many do not make it, and wash up in other sleepy unexplored regions of the globe. Many stay, and many never find that paradise. Many others do indeed find that warm center of the City, guided by the light inside their tired eyes and the spirits of a beautiful future death far away. It is these success stories that keep the others in their perpetual anxious loops.
I can say that I reached the absolute summit of all my acid tears and hard sweat. San Francisco was a sweet taste in the back of my tongue and it was everything I hoped that it would be. For a little while, any way. In one perfect duration I felt the profane, the sacred, the bizarre and the wonderful all at once. I had reached the center of my labyrinth.
But as I entered that sweet nexus point at the end of the maze where ideology meets reality, I awoke to find that I was on the tail end of a relentless Ouroboros. Time and time again I was on the edge of that tail, staring into the eyes of betrayal and disappointment. Time and time again the forces of nature urged for my departure but I pinned my ears back and planted my two feet and died some manufactured death, resting in a latent bed of misery hoping for rebirth. And then, on a particularly nondescript morning, I woke up to find that I felt no pain, and no regret in my sudden departure.