Learn From It

This is an entry from ten years ago to the day, during my first waking hours as a new San Franciscan. I wrote it in (a more legible then) longhand-scrawl in a cheap, red spiral-bound notebook bought in Iowa, apparently, on the drive out here from Chicagoland. I wrote it at the Just for you Too cafe, a terrific place no longer there, alas. Forgive the schlock! and the exclamation points!!! Not surprisingly, however, the tenor of this entry, of my outlook on life and living here, has not dimmed over the last decade. I do so love this place.

This morning I brushed my teeth from a gold-plated faucet and rinsed in a cheap wine glass (of all things).

A few minutes later, as I was beginning to despair of ever evidencing any of my new PC-dyke [as Rex called them at the time] neighbors: a sneeze! I looked out the window of the bedroom. Yup! Neighbor number 1.

As I walked outside—discovering that it was much warmer than my indoors would suggest—I wondered exactly what combination of wild-ass circumstances got me to this place, this neighborhood! Geraniums growing like rosebushes, rosebushes growing like trees! And impatiens like shrubbery! An iron railing (painted light-blue—where else but SF?) to the right, upon which a butterfly lights. A butterfly the likes of which have never been seen in the East.

In an alarmingly short jaunt over to Church & 30th to a totally primo breakfast café (now under new dyke management, as I just overhears—but still primo), the people the plants, the tiki-majesty of the J-Church, there's nothing calculated, nothing planned, nothing in particular that would suggest—or rather, betray—that any of this was a set piece. Wow.

The huevos rancheros were excellent, but I suppose that Mickey D's would've tasted great on my first meal as a San Franciscan.