Due to time constraints, there will be no time lapse this week. I am in the process of moving. Here's a blog as a consolation prize! Thanks - Jon
Every armchair San Francisco anti-tech tankstopper has probably read all about the horrific nightmare that is currently happening in City limits: eviction rates are at an alltime high in every neighborhood, shady as fuck landlords "mysteriously" torching Old Mission ablaze and replacing the rich vibrant culture with filing cabinets full of cumfart Tinder tit fuckers who drive automated vehicles powered by poor people blood.
To downshift the hyperbole by a league, the saddest eviction stories happening in realtime here in Zombie San Francisco are the ones of the elderly and the disabled. We're talking about the original contingent, people who've lived in buildings and flats their whole lives for 20-50 years. Suddenly a 10,000% rent hike here and an illegal eviction slip there, and *poof*, HOMELESS ELDERS. Shitty to hear about, shitty to read about.
And certainly a shitty reality check when you come home one day to find two of them suddenly on a couch in your house. Art had mysteriously forgotten to tell anybody that we had company, so it rubbed everyone in the house the wrong way initially. But from the sound of the situation it didn't appear that he had time to create a 7 day pre-emptive memo on custom headers.
Joe and Jane OldFolksmith were nice enough. They were gallery owners downtown around the Union Square area, had moved to San Francisco in the 60's and caught the hippie wave right at the crown of the crest. Art explained to me that he was letting them stay on the couch, because in the span of a week, they had been evicted from the apartment they had called home since 1970something, and then their gallery landlord expired their lease and "renegotiated" at a 1000% hike.
Joe and Jane were easily pushing their early 80s (probably, I forgot to ask). And to see them without a home, without jobs and without any sort of retirement package certainly broke my heart. To see an elderly couple sleeping side by side in a transient state, with two suitcases full of all that they had left in the world, well that was just a fucking shitty thing to happen to them.
So Art kind of assured me and the rest of the house that he would assume responsibility for them, and clean up after them should the occasion arise. He thanked me for being understanding and apologized for the lack of notice.
Well that's just fucking terrible, I replied solemnly, and let the unannounced vacancy slide. For all of two days.
Let's talk about me for a quick second. I am a relatively reasonable person to live with. I keep clean, I do my chores at a C+ to A- performance clip, and I go out of my way to step on a grand total of zero toes, though it doesn't always end up that way. But when my shit gets fucked with, I turn into a short-tempered, impatient and particular creature. One could argue that most people act this way, on a median basis of polite discontent.
I woke up that first morning to the main floor reeking of piss. When I ventured into the bathroom, the trashbin was full of old adult diapers, and the toilet seat was covered in a shit stain pattern that I had never EVER seen before. I wasn't even really mad the first time, I was actually kind of impressed. It just looked like there was some poop hunter who was hunting poop, and this poop had done some weird backwards and sideways prancing to cover his true tracks.
"Oh man, I'm sorry," Art sheepishly recalled, "They're both incontinent."
This went on for about a week and a half. I could lie to you and say that I took it merrily on the chin and whistled while i worked. But the truth is I felt like such a douchebag for running out of patience. Here I am trying to donate to homeless organizations, and unable to fully practice what I preached because I couldn't handle the smell of old urine. It was a humbling reality check.
Thanks in large part to this experience, there are now two fringes of the modern living spectrum that I will do everything in my power to avoid, and fervently strive for a creamy middle that hopefully exists somewhere for me.
THE ASSEMBLY LINE JACKOFF
Even to this day I still have this odd pang in for "normalcy". Yes, I am aware that this idea of normal was handed to me. I'm supposed to reach these weird milestones like buy a house, maybe a car, marry and have kids and perpetuate the American dream. But at some point you look underneath all the car endorsements and the detergent intermissions and the 200 foot billboards and the pudding jingles, and you see that this is all rooted in fear of dying dickless, alone and broke.
My dad was forced onto a path not unlike this one by my grandma a long while ago. He was always a gestural, emotionally sensitive creative type. The first cartoon he ever drew me was of a Volkswagen Beetle driving to a McDonald's on a hill. Over the years he drew that Volkswagen Bug piddlepaddling to McD's, until one day he stopped drawing and just started yelling at me for getting B-'s in Algebra II.
His sisters all got to go to art school in Tokyo, but his mother, my grandmother, insisted on shoving him in the Assembly Line Jackoff Factory. You MUST get an office job. Computers are the wave of the future. Earn that responsible paycheck, buy that corner house in the suburbs, have children with your wife you met in college. It's predictable, it's boring and you'll want to gouge your eyes out staring at the Zenith TV every single night you bought with your hard-earned taxable income that is also going towards the mortgage and the kids' college tuition.... but BUCK UP!!!! It's a guarantee that humanity's gears are well oiled and built on the backs of hardworking, taxpaying citizens such as yourself.
My dad sat me down senior year of high school as I was looking at colleges and implored me to run with my artistic abilities and try and cut it there. He wanted me to live out my true potential, instead of getting shoehorned into another Assembly Line Jackoff existence like he was. I will never forget that moment in my life, because in particularly hard moments of Kale + Toast + Delinquent Bils, I think about that speech he gave me. At my weakest, I want that manufactured normalcy. I want to buy in. I want to fit like a square round hole for once. I want to wear a suit and drive a shiny car. I want bosses and corporate ladders, and office halls full of deceitful backstabbing co-workers who all want that meaningless trophy for biggest overcompensating yacht or house or breast implants on the wife.
I let these feelings flood my brain like a torrent of mindless pornography, and I expel it from my consciousness nowadays like ejaculate caught in a milk truck hurricane.
THE CARD-CARRYING KEROUAC STRAY CAT
I imagine a lot of Assembly Line Jackoffs often dream about being the Bohemian escapee. Light that silk full Windsor noose on fire, open a boutique selling hand made wares on Urbana Hip Cabana USA! Travel far and away, collect coasters with obnoxious ümlauts on the letters! Shoot pistols naked in the rainforest and do exotic designer drugs with circus freaks and moped mobsters!!! Sleep on bare floors until you're 95, then jump into a volcano and let the cosmos bend your delayed ray of light, like ACROSS THE GALAXY MAN.
Many will look at my life decisions and lifestyle aesthetic overall and declare me to be cut of this cloth. I guess I fit the bill on some level. I'm usually the outsider, even amongst outsiders, even though I am the topic of whispers down the hall and around the corner out of earshot. Is that guy serious? Did he get lost on the way to a Hunter S Thompson reject pile? Who let the pariah into the picnic with ripped Dickies and a Suicidal Tendencies baseball shirt?
On some level I take all that heresay and half smile patronage and it gives me a source of fuel. I look at Timmy Tesla and Gary Google and go "yeah, fuck you phoney-ass piece of shit. Good luck falling in slo mo into your billion dollar vanilla wafer coffin." Sure, they will probably live longer than me because they can afford to eat, sleep and fuck healthier. But fuck them, I'm a nonconFORMIST. YEAH! It fucking RULES being a working class creative with nothing to lose! I will NEVER buy into The MAN®!!!!! I don't need to SAVE any MONEY, when I have a whole community of FRIENDS I can rely that will live forever!!! I don't need to get paid, because Mo Money Mo Problems!!!
And then, for about a week and a half, I saw the end of the line of that train of thought. I saw Joe and Jane OldFolksmith, alone and huddled together in a borrowed den. Their eyes glimmered with faded hope, milky and glossed from cataracts and trifocals. They sing tonedeaf songs of yesterday, mixed with their current chalky existences, maybe some burnt shadows of memories fading slowly away in their crumbling cerebral facades. The kindness of the last nice man in all of San Francisco had kept them off the street. But almost everything they had built was washed away, grains of proverbial sand in a broken hourglass.
I suppose it's all fun and games until you wake up one day with nowhere to go but irregularly into your adult diapers.
I will never be Joe. I will never be a Kerouac Stray Cat.