The Bay Area, People!
I always forget that San Francisco kind of gives me the creeps. Not the people or even the city per se. There’s just a vibe up there, maaaan. An electric darkness.
Before I try to figure that out, I do want to say that the shows were great. The show at the Uptown Theater in Napa was a blast. It’s a great theater. I’m not sure what is going on up there in Napa but I don’t think it’s much. Not in a bad way. I assume that’s why people live there.
I went into a thrift shop and they had records. I picked a few out and took them up to the counter. One didn’t have a price tag. So, one of the women that owned the place had to track down the woman who was in charge of the records. It looked like it might take a while to figure out if the Mary McCaslin record I wanted was 16 dollars or around ten which is what I thought it should be. At some point it didn’t look like they were going to track the record lady down so they reached out to her boyfriend and told him to find her. A lot of action around a ten dollar record. The woman behind the counter asked if I would be around tomorrow. I said, ‘No.’ I didn’t care about the record that much. I wasn’t going to stay the night. I guess that is sort of the pace up there.
They eventually tracked the record lady down. It was eight bucks. I knew it. A bargain. And I didn’t have to get a hotel room.
I hadn’t been in San Francisco in a long time. I lived there years ago. I think I may not realize the effect of what I went through there on my psyche in terms of the residual effect when I visit. I ran to SF. I was running away from drugs and failure in NYC. I was a mess. I went to SF to throw myself down at the mercy of a woman. She took me back and I wrestled with drugs and career stuff for two years in the weirdness of SF. Rough time.
SF is a chaotic, nebulous place built on a spiritual fault line. A crack that releases the ghosts that occupied the city at different times during its history. They keep the weirdness going. The dark crackling hum that has run through the time of the psychedelic warriors and the tech nerds and sexual revolutionaries and dock weirdos and the prospectors and witches. They’re always kind of around.
All of that triggers my own instability from the time I was there. Lost. At the mercy of the ghost frequency. Of course this is just a theory.
I tried to go back in time with my buddy Jack. We went and got a forearm-sized burrito in the Mission. Like the old days. Half way through it I knew it would be the last burrito I would ever eat in my lifetime. Like a bad night with tequila. I was done.
Kevin Christy opened for me up there. He’s a comic and painter. He knows a lot about art. I’m no slouch but he got me to go to SFMOMA and introduced me to the work of Tauba Auerbach. It was a huge survey show. A lot of stuff. A lot of mediums. Genius. Truly. Brain bending. The good waves at the edge of the ghost portal. Wrangling the deep stuff.
Down in the Mission I went and stood in front of my old apartment. Thought about the chaotic mad guy that lived there once. Me. Trying to figure out how to be who he was. I closed the circle looking up at the bay window I sat and looked out of.
Today I talk to Andy Garcia. Good guy, great actor. On Thursday I talk to W. Kamau Bell about his new doc We Need to Talk About Cosby. Great talks.
Enjoy!
Boomer, Monkey and LaFonda live!
Love,
Maron
Ghost Portal.
