Perfect Day

Exuberance is beauty

William Blake

Note-book (1793)

Blessed are the perfect days. I would imagine that everybody has their own version of the perfect day. For some it could be betting on all the right horses, for others it could be closing the big deal. No matter what it is, it’s all abut things coming together, planned or unplanned, in a way that is completely satisfying to the heart, mind, body, and soul. Day to day life in the modern world requires us to be busybodies not much different from ants and bees. We follow along and do what we are told. But every now and then we break from the grid and have that perfect day where we have freed ourselves to live beyond the daily grind and can soar like eagles on the power of our vitality and imagination.

All I require for a perfect day is a little cooperation from Mother Nature and last Wednesday, September 30th 2009 she relented. As soon as I woke up I could feel it. The day was calm yet there was excitement in the air. When I first peered out of the window I saw a brilliant cerulean sky with undistorted clarity. The day is inviting, beckoning me to come out of my cave and bask in the glory. What I actually do is less important than what I feel. The perfect day is all about enjoying the feeling of being alive, to be grateful to breath good clean air and be humbled by the beauty of the real world. One of my favorite perfect days was many years ago when I was a younger man and not really anchored to life. I was working at a resident camp in Big Bear California as a Ropes Course Instructor. It was an escape from organized living. All I owned was the suitcase of thrift store clothes I brought with me and a mountain bike. The camp I lived and worked was about 5 kilometers from the nearest paved road and ran on a generator. All the food was trucked in weekly and the infrastructure was all tank based; propane tanks, water tanks, and sceptic tanks. My best friends Jon and Megan also worked at the camp as wranglers in charge of the 18 horses the camp rented for recreational horseback riding. In my spare time I would hang out at the stables helping Jon and Megan saddle, feed, and wipe down the horses. After dinner in the early evening we would go on unfettered horseback rides through the alpine forest that surrounded and engulfed the camp. A horse is a magnificent beast of burden. Before that summer at camp I had virtually no experience riding horses. I was hooked from my first ride. I have driven cars, flown a plane, and surfed waves but none of that compares to riding a horse. The power of an organic mass of muscle, blood, and bone underneath a human body sans air bags and seat belts is absolutely exhilarating. We had a fire break out in the woods one night right outside of camp. Thankfully the fire was contained and didn’t damage any camp property but it spooked the horses real good and they took off into the woods. The next day was gorgeous with stunning deep blue skies and air so good you could taste the alpine. I volunteered to help Jon and Megan round up the horses. We were joined by Joka, a feisty exchange student from the Netherlands. We found the horses in a meadow up the hill off road 2N10. We roped the horses up train style and led them down the mountain. It was such a heavenly day we took our sweet time getting back to camp making many stops to give water to the horses and admire the breathtaking views. The visual treats were highlighted by the peaceful sounds of the gentle wind caressing the pine trees. No sounds of man or machine just the planet earth in its raw state. We didn’t talk much. We were all in awe of the splendor. In moments like this I am overwhelmed with gratitude to be alive.

Let us return to 2009 where nobody talks about riding horses or beautiful blue skies on Twitter and Facebook. What am I to do on this Perfect Day? I have no job to go to so I have the entire day at my disposal. The only for sure plan I had for the day was going to a wine tasting in the evening at Corkage and possibly going to see the dynamic duo of Michael Cavaseno on guitar and David Boyce on sax entertaining the diners at Solstice. I didn’t have to think much about what to do. Give me a few hours and a sunny, clear day and I’m going for a bike ride. Before I hop on my Bianchi Veloce 928 I spend a few hours at Coffee Tea and Central my local java hut to have my morning caffeine, work on my tan, and take in the sidewalk parade of neighborhood folks, every other one of them with dog in tow. I like to sit outside in the front so I get to check out all the dogs who are leashed to the public garbage can. The dogs are friendly to human beings but sometimes they have issues with each other and I enjoy watching the sniping. Second to the dogs are the baby strollers. In this sometimes backwards city the dogs have it over the babies and the kids. Personally I like the kids better than the dogs because they have diapers and they don’t dump on my tree or on the sidewalks or pee on anything that isn’t in motion. I’m a taxpayer and I can’t take dumps on the sidewalk but dogs owners think its ok for their dogs to do it. The tree in front of my building gets assaulted daily and every week or so I have to go out and clean up after someone else’s dogs. On Perfect Day dog doo is not on my mind so I can sit back and watch them act like the goofy, happy animals they are.

For my bike ride I decide I am going to do the Paradise Loop which will take me over the Golden Gate Bride and through the quaint Marin county towns of Sausalito, Mill Valley, Corta Madera, Tiburon and Belvedere. All in all it’s just a hair under 40 miles round trip. The beauty of this ride is I don’t have to face any major traffic and I get the best views of the bay and the City. The biggest challenge will be crossing the bridge and dodging all the San Francisco struck tourists. The City That Used to Know How closes the bike path on the west side of the bridge until 3:30pm. This was in response to the 9/11 attacks in New York in 2001. Some lunatic Saudis fly jet liners into skyscrapers and the cyclists of San Francisco lose their best and only bridge crossing route. Until 3:30pm we have to ride the east side path with the camera toting, sometimes clueless, pedestrian tourists. During most of the summer no matter how sunny the City is the bridge is always enshrouded in thick fog and high winds with about two feet of visibility and dodging the tourists is like playing some twisted video game. But it’s Perfect Day so even that can not harsh on my realm and it’s not so bad now that summer is officially over for tourists. After crossing the bridge I bomb down the hill into Sausalito, the destination for all those people walking across the bridge. Sausalito has a great view of the City and Alcatraz but not as good as views that await me so I keep my head down and pedal past the tourists until I get to the bike path that takes me to a small climb up Camino Alto Ave. not too far from the Tourist Club known to us locals as the German Beer Garden because literally that’s what it is. Unfortunately today I’m just riding by and not stopping in for a cold one. I come down the other side zipping around the hair pin turns to Tamalpais Dr. and head westbound to Paradise Dr to do the loop around the Tiburon/Belvedere peninsula.

This area represents some prime living and some of the best views in all of California but for all of its luxurious living the first landmark you see across the bay is the fortress known as San Quentin Prison. The homes are not the large gaudy mansions that you would find in Beverly Hills or other hoity toity neighborhoods. What makes Tiburon and Belvedere appealing besides the stellar aquatic views are the small Eichler homes, the quaint, woodsy neighborhood ambiance, and the feeling of being away from it all without being away from it all. On Paradise Dr. you will see more bikes on the road than cars and even though we are in the midst of an economic meltdown you would never know it cruising the tree lined curvaceous road. Coming around the horn and heading south the next landmark that comes into view is the San Rafael Bridge that connects the two worlds of Marin and Contra Costa counties. The bridge starts in San Rafael, the home of Lucas Ranch and ILM and empties out across the bay in Richmond not to far from the Iron Triangle. When I first moved to San Francisco in 1991 Richmond led the nation in homicides per capita beating out perennial champions Newark, Baltimore, and Washington DC. In the East Bay Oakland has the rep but Richmond is the real deal. Looking at Richmond from across the water from Paradise Rd. it doesn’t look so bad.

The last section of the loop brings me to the southern end of Belvedere which brings Angel Island into view. Angel Island seems close enough to hit with a thrown rock. I don’t know how Angel Island got its name but the island has quite a history. Its first inhabitants were the Miwok Indians but the island is mostly known for being an internment camp for the Chinese who emigrated to California during the early part of the 20th century to work on the railroads. Unlike Ellis Island that welcomed European immigrants with open arms Angel Island existed to deter the deluge of Chinese men coming to the States to find work. It was a straight up prison. The Chinese were held there for immigration questioning. What remains of the barracks is a museum now which can be visited by taking the ferry from Tiburon or Sausalito. At the very end of the loop where Paradise Rd becomes Tiburon Blvd the City comes into view and on this clear day all the City landmarks are visible; the pyramid Transamerica building, Coit Tower, Sutro Tower, the duomo at the Palace of Fine Arts, and the two bridges, the utilitarian Bay Bridge and the majestic Golden Gate Bridge. In my opinion this is the finest view of the City. If it was emerald colored it would be called Oz. Following Tiburon Blvd takes me back to the bike path in Sausalito where I cross the bridge again and ride through the Presidio back to my apartment off the Panhandle.

Perfect Day to be continued in the next blog entry…

Tolerance Part 2

...continued

Last weekend I attended the 60th birthday party of Tom Balk who is the father of my good friend Aubri Balk who flew in from New York where she now lives to surprise her father. I’ve been to several parties at the spacious Balk residence in the Castro. Aubri’s mother Michelle is usually the host and life of the party. She is quite a character, in another life she was probably a vaudevillian stage performer. There was a small open bar set up in the backyard offering champagne, beer, wine, and an assortment of proofed booze. The crowd was a little older and definitely more indulgent than parties I had recently attended. When a gaggle of gay neighbors arrived the energy of the party picked up a few notches. The straight men kept to themselves for the most part but the wives and gay men started partying like it’s 1999. They were hootin and hollerin and having a blast with Michelle being the main instigator of the madness. It was all in good fun. That’s how it usually is with parties at Aubri’s parents house.

Round midnight after getting liquored up pretty good Mickey (Aubri’s ex boyfriend), Rad ( a cool dude who I just met), and I decided it was time to hit the pavement. It’s about a 20 minute walk back to my neighborhood north of the Panhandle right through the heart of the Castro. On a Saturday night the Castro is like Mardi Gras. The sidewalks are packed and the bars are overflowing. Mickey had been dropping hints all day he wanted to hit one of the Castro bars on the way home. Mickey is a barfly straight up. He’s one of those people who can walk into any bar in any part of the City and know at least half the people in the place. It wasn’t too difficult to get Rad and me to comply. Mickey steered us to a bar called Moby Dick (perfect name for a gay bar) on the corner of 18th and Hartford. Moby Dick is a popular neighborhood bar that has been around for 30 years. I’ve biked past it many times but this is my first time actually going into the place. It’s a cavernous bar by San Francisco standards. The first thing you notice walking in is the huge fish tank above the bar. The neon blue illumination from the fish tank and the multicolor glow from the four large screen televisions provided all the interior lighting for the place giving it a disco feel but nobody was dancing. The place was wall to wall humid people, some playing pool in the back and most in groups of threes, fours, and fives, conversating and enjoying the liquidity. The mix of gender was about 70% men and 30% women. Mickey and I and one other guy were the only brothas in the place. We worked our way through the crowd to the bar front and center and bumped into four dudes that new Mickey. Of course I was not at all surprised. The guy is know in all corners. It turns out these guys work with Mickey and Rad. Introductions were made and the guys started talking shop. Since I wasn’t privy to the workplace details I spent my time perusing the scene and checking out the crowd. Being 6’5” as I am it is the logical thing to do. One of Mickey’s buddies pick pocketed his wallet and produced a crispy $100 bill. The pilferer looked at me with a big grin like the cat the got the canary and said “He won’t care.” and in the next 10 minutes ordered three rounds of Cazadores tequila shots on Mickey’s dime. I’m part agave, tequila is in my blood so the shots went down without a fight. Since I had been partaking of the nectar all day and I wasn’t looking for a date I decided it was a good time to say my goodbyes and head for the casa. The semi short walk was enough to sober me up. I reflected on my brief foray into Moby Dick and decided it wasn’t any different than many of the other bars I have been to in my life (quite a few). All that was missing was the skirt chasing rituals. I’m still not sure how that all plays out in a gay bar. Nobody at Moby Dick hit on me, grabbed my butt, or gave me funny or dirty looks. Gay men can usually tell straight guys from gay guys and they respect the boundaries. I could do a whole night of drinking and socializing at Moby Dick no problem. It had a fun and festive atmosphere and the people seemed down to earth and were enjoying themselves. When gay people get together they know how to have a good time. Overall I’d say generally speaking gay people have a better time socializing with each other than straight people do. In all my years living in San Francisco I have never met a gay person who was lonely or didn’t have a ton of friends.

The Castro like much of the City has been gentrified and has become more mainstream in its outward appearance. In my early days of living in the City one of my roommates was a waitress at Sparky’s Diner located on the east end of the Castro on Church street. Sparky’s was the place to go to get your grub on after the bars closed. The only other places to go were the Lucky Penny and Denny’s and those places were strictly for out-of-towners. My roommate worked the late night shift with one of the members of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. The Sisters were a group of men who dressed up in nun habits and gowns, crucifixes, leather, chains, fish net stockings, and white Elizabethan face paint. They’ve been showing up at all the gay themed events in the City since the early 80’s. They’re a combination performance/activist group. They had lots of friends and imitators in and around the Castro who liked to hang out at Sparky’s during the witching hours. I would often see men walking around the Castro in outrageous drag, day and night. It was a normal part of the scene. The 70’s Castro dress code of handlebar mustache, tight t-shirt, jeans, and motorcycle boots of the Harvey Milk days is long gone and if you were to take one of the many tour busses through the Castro you’d be hard pressed to see any guys in drag. It’s even hard to find them in the Tenderloin which used to be Drag Queen Central. In the Castro it’s no longer Halloween 365 days a year. The Folsom Street Faire and the Gay Pride parade are still going strong but other than those few days the Castro looks like Anytown USA. Like many minority groups in America gays and lesbians are mainstreaming their look to gain greater acceptance from the Moral Majority. They want to get married and raise families like everybody else. Rapists, murderers, serial killers, Satanists, and Atheists are allowed to marry but our society doesn’t want to extend that right to gay and lesbian people. When you have been around gay and lesbian people and know them from experience it just seems ridiculous to deny them marriage rights. They are human beings, no better and no worse than other human beings. When are we going to get off the high horse?

Tolerance

Prejudices are what fools use for reason.

Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet)

Poeme sur la vie naturelle (1756)

In my humble opinion there is no legitimate argument against the validity of homosexual relationships. What is offered up as logic and rationale to invalidate homosexual relationships are really just excuses for bigotry, discrimination, sexism, and chauvinism. I don’t expect humans to be perfect. No doubt we are a flawed species but our flaws are not absolute. The greatness of leading a purposeful, prosperous, and generous life is recognizing, challenging, and overcoming our flaws. As social beings living in rigid, structured societies it has become easy to live behind the wall of mob mentality and groupthink. No experience necessary, just eat up the propaganda, digest it, and dump the load into the cesspool of intolerance. That’s the easiest and laziest way to deal with our ignorance. Just grab the lowest, rotting fruit on the tree.

For now let’s put that all aside. It’s not going anywhere. Its been with us since the beginning of time and we aren’t about to leave it at the doorstep. Instead let us look at personal responsibility, what we stand for as individuals and actual life experience. What we deem as our personal responsibility and what we construct as our individual system of morality is meaningless until it slams up against the reality that opposes and challenges it. It’s just petulant prose and pious theory, like words chiseled on stone tablets ready to be thrown into the fires of the condemned. Experience rarely validates the predisposed dispositions. Rather, experience liberates us from propaganda and intellectual bondage and illuminates the void of ignorance and superstition so that where we were once blind we are allowed to see.

When I moved to San Francisco from Los Angeles 18 years ago I was neutral when it came to the gay community and their mission of achieving the human rights of love, marriage, and community. Like many I was one who would give lip service to the cause but I wasn’t willing to stand on the front lines and fight the good fight. In a sense I was blind because what I believed was not based on any kind of reality or experience. My beliefs were challenged the day I splashed down on the shores of the City by the trifecta of home, work, and community. My first set of roommates were all former graduates of Cal Arts. It was a household of quintessential San Francisco equilibrium; two men and two women, two black and two white, four artistic individuals expressing themselves through distinctly different mediums. All we needed to be a true prototype San Francisco family was homosexuality which we lacked as we are all straight heteros, breeders by another name. We had a four bedroom flat with two bathrooms. The bathroom split was not based on gender as it is everywhere else on the planet. Ours was split by our ethnicity. I didn’t make the rules. I was just the new guy following along with the way things had been established. Truth be told there was no Jim Crowe angle it’s just how the math worked out. As a matter of fact if I had to choose a bathroom partner I would have chosen Pat anyway. Pat was a sista who over time became the spiritual big sister I never had. We kept a spartan, minimalist bathroom. Between the two of us we had no prescriptions and barely enough hygiene products to fill half a medicine cabinet. The other bathroom bonded to Sten the stoic Swede and Fraulein Alexis the cabaret singer was like a bohemian sanctuary adorned with half melted candles, fruit flavored incense, potpourri, varying sizes of orange plastic prescription containers with adult proof tops, multiplying bottles of hair and skin products, and enough knick knacks to have their own booth at the Haight Street Faire. When Pat or I had to use the bathroom we did our business without much fanfare, in and out. With Sten and Alexis a trip to the bathroom was more like an excursion. It was a combination of personal hygiene and communing with the gods.

Pat’s best friend Susan was a lesbian. She was the first gay/lesbian person I would get to know. Often on a Saturday or Sunday we’d go out to breakfast at the Pork Store, Ella’s, or Crescent City Café with Susan and her partner Mary. Susan was the feminine one and she was all blonde hair and smiles. Mary was the masculine half. She had short dark hair and she dressed in muscle t-shirts with Marlboro Reds rolled up the shoulder sleeve, 501 jeans, and black work boots. After getting to know Susan and Mary I realized that the roles of masculine and feminine were just a masquerade. When you got past the look what you had were two authentic and good hearted human beings. They talked about what everybody else talks about, their jobs, their friends, their relationships, their neighbors, politics, religion, shopping, and they also talked about starting a family. Why wouldn’t they? They are human beings. Why would they not have a strong desire to have a family? It would be like not having a strong desire to breathe, eat, or make love.

My first job in San Francisco was working for the Buchanan YMCA across the street from Japantown in the Western Addition. The YMCA of San Francisco was an association of branches spread throughout the City serving the various neighborhoods and districts. Each branch was a reflection of the district it represented. The Metropolitan branch was the administrative entity for all the branches and it was located in the Financial district. On the eight floor of a highrise the Metro staff wore urban professional clothing, dark suits, ties, and dresses in contrast to the branch folks who wore polo shirts emblazoned with the YMCA logo and branch name. Metro had quite a few gay and lesbian employees, mostly concentrated in the Personnel and Finance departments. As a Program Director these are the departments I usually dealt with when making my pilgrimages to the downtown offices. As a new employee I found the gay and lesbian staff to be the friendliest and most welcoming. If you were a branch person you could feel the air of superiority when entering the Metro offices which I guess was inevitable given they were the head of the association. It was all very formal. Suits and dresses zipping to and fro ready for the next meeting armed with manila folders, leather briefcases, and stern faces. The gay and lesbian staff stood out because they were the ones who would acknowledge your presence and treat you like a relevant human being. They’d chat you up and try to get to know you as a person while most of the straight staff exhibited the business-as-usual stone faced bureaucracy. Each branch of the YMCA is made up of its staff, its members, and its army of volunteers. The Western Addition due to its cheap rents, diverse neighborhoods, and proximity to the Castro district attracted a lot of gay and lesbian people and that was reflected in Buchanan’s membership and volunteer base. Each department of the Y had a volunteer committee that acted as advocate and a good number of citizens on the committees were gay and lesbian. As a director I worked directly with the committees and I found the gay and lesbian committee members to be the most reliable, dedicated, and hard working. They had a strong desire to contribute to the community they lived in.

After six years and three different roommate situations I found myself living on Grove Street a half a block west of Alamo Square and half a block east of Divisadero. I lived in a studio apartment in a nine unit building. Half the people in the building were gay or lesbian. My neighbor across the hall was a Jewish lesbian. On the first floor lived a gay couple, one black and the other white. They were two buffed out little guys who had a couple of teeny toy dogs. On more than one occasion after coming home from the bars past 2 am I’d run into one of them dressed only in bun hugger briefs and flip flops walking the toy dogs in the hallway with plastic bag in hand. Neither one had any issue being practically naked and letting their toy dogs drop loads on the hallway carpet. They’d see me and smile and ask me how my evening was. I didn’t trip because for San Francisco this was normal. In some other part of the country this scenario would play out much differently. It could be perceived as shocking or distasteful, even immoral. It would come down to perception because the reality is its just someone walking their dog and taking care of nature’s business. I could take issue with the dogs shatting on the carpet but they were tiny dogs who shat tiny, dry shats that were easy to pick up and didn’t soil the carpet. If it had been some huge bear of a dog with loose bowels well then I’d have to call 911 or something as that would be just disgusting by anyone’s standards. It’s something I find truly disturbing on the sidewalks which unfortunately in San Francisco is an everyday occurrence. It’s a dog loving city and there are some things you have to learn to tolerate. Living in an urban community one must learn to tolerate because all around one will find things that are slightly to very annoying but one learns to live with it because we all do at least one thing that is annoying to our neighbors. That is the nature of the urban beast. This is something a lot of just-from-the-suburb new homeowners don’t quite understand. They spend top dollar to purchase their dream shack and then get frustrated because the neighborhood won’t bend and adapt to their suburban sensibilities. This is the true cause of friction between home owners and renters. Homeowners want a dictatorship and renters want to live and let live. I know because I have been on both sides of the equation.

...to be continued