san francisco of the mind

the first week of january we had a week off + took the pacific starlight up the coast for a few days in sf. our first train ride ever. lots of distracted reading interrupted by watchings of southern california disappearing below us & light napping & exchanging secret-joke smiles with a history teacher across the aisle who had a very eccentric seatmate, & j. paused over paper & then writing away, alone in his world of line-breaks, & him waking me up to look out of sun-drenched windows at sparkling ocean waves & greengreen nor-cal hills. nightfall & whiskey & topsy-turvy train-walking & card games with other young coupled passengers. i met a dapper man, greyed with age in glasses & a sharp navy blazer, after discussions on dr. seuss & magic-reality & the glory of antiquity, i offered archival services for a place to eat & sleep, drunkenly writing down my contact info & adding : Magic Extraordinaire Bibliophile below my name, number, & e-mail. as though obsessively reading books & cultivating child-like wonder qualifies me for anything even remotely academic. he never called, which may have been a good thing because the next morning, remembering what i had wrote, i blushed & then laughed; embarrassed but amused.

midnight arrivings & buzzed suitcase lugging up embarcadero, shacking up in north beach next to the "best girls in town".



the contrast of chinatown brights against grey overcasts.



acid for the first time in a disco-lit ballroom, surrendering my kiss on a stairwell to a stranger in a black hat with just the right words. writing dirty poems in another's moleskine & finding words in his hand scrawled in my sketchbook, scribbling the night away with electric conversationconnections, ferlinghetti's ghost right outside the windows. dream sequence walk-abouts & talk-abouts & trip-outs. the next morning re-entering the ballroom around brunch l. reef said : "you've returned from your trip! i transcribed our night." & he read to me with passionconviction thoughts from some other place while i timidly reviewed overtly seductive words in my handwriting hiding between his pages, under which he had written :"from a cute girl". later, returning home, between postcards & train schedules, tickets & candy wrappers,i found a piece of paper from that same moleskine & it says : intrification (unawareness of The Nostalgia of Tomorrow). the -"ness".

flying books lighting the sky overhead & tape instigations underfoot.



i really hope it's supposed to say "america never provided me a good enough excuse TO grow up".

free museum day = off to the super-packed moma for the art of participation 1950 to now exhibit during which i had flashbacks that made some of the paintings feel like they were coming off the wall & surrounding me, like 3-D paint layers swirling out. j. told me to expect a little offness, & was thankfully there for steadying & much hand squeezing as i navigated through it all. so much to see & do. voice delays & then j.'s voice speaking out of microphones. rauschenberg in person was so,so good. i stood in front of his work for a long time, & looked at it a second time on the way out. the beat museum for the purchasing of bathtub reading & my new favoritest "books not bombs" pin. i loved the earth rose poster with :





the last day we wandered haight, mostly for amobea + bound together , where j. was ecstatic after finding a book he'd been looking for. (between here & city lights the two of us bought so many books that we had to buy another bag to get them all home in.) long meandering strolls through golden gate park, making friends with squirrels & looking closely at black-spotted & eaten leaves.



the ride back home was sleep-filled & distorted, i was reading a book ending with ice avalanches, coldness & darkness & we were in thick gray fog over half the day.