The city is starting to become differently legible to me, and it feels spooky but also reassuring. Memories attach like muscles to a map, and then six different stories sit up during a jaunt to a bistro. There’s the stairs with the car, the park where it still happens, the street where the drill took place. Normal, but wild.
On the verge of several new things, it felt good to go do old things, like getting back in the saddle of the bike at home, or getting going early enough to hit the donut shop, or lift a lot of boxes in the search for one particular thing.
Even a little break in the rain since midweek was welcome, and it felt like you could feel the spring in some people’s steps around public streets in the city today.
When you conjoin the messenger and the mine owner up in the sky, it’s only fitting to find them in front of you as well, Not only in the environment, power outages notwithstanding, but in people as well. What a week, and still only Monday.
The story always changes when you’re in it, when shivering the side of your vehicle as you’re crossing a bridge upper deck, watching 30-ft traffic signs side to side or just nervously navigating a neighborhood with night falling and time running out on a shift. When life is a movie, it’s not the plot that’s the problem. It’s the scenery.
There’s rain again, tomorrow and tomorrow, and there’s no census to capture every drop that flies past my window at work or that lands on the patio bannister or the roof at home. But I’ll see some of them again, maybe over by the greenway in the creek, or in the mist in highway lanes. Maybe they’ll see me too.
Ten years to make, and still right on time, resonant in multiple directions, turning the faces on the street not far from the theater in bright sunlight suddenly suspect, if not all too susceptible.
Sun and rain tried trading places, trickling down at odd times today, with just enough energy to get in each other’s way, showcase the other’s work while stealing the spotlight. Fair amounts are due to linger through next Sunday’s larger deluge.
I got up early, hoping to beat the rush at the first of the day’s rains. There was enough time for me to make it to the donut shop over in Noe Valley and back before starting my shift. Empty streets were empty all the way through the Mission and uphill, the car windshield got lightly spritzed and the shop clerk was generous.
It wasn’t a dream, but it had its own logic: memory playing back on a loop, narrative laying out battles between good and evil with high stakes; familiar faces not met in person in months or even years, changed by time or age or the perspective of light moving on a large screen before a roomful of people who knew or didn’t know exactly how it all went down.
