California, rest in peace.

"The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way." - Joan Didion

The beers came with frosted mugs, lips rimmed with chili-salt like the little jars of Lucas seasoning I would buy from ice cream trucks in my Burbank grade school days. Two Coronas and a Modelo Especial while we waited for our street-style tacos in one of the booths on the more secluded side of the restaurant, where our suits drew a few less stares from the other customers. We had about an hour to kill before the wedding reception began a mile away at the Museum of Latin American Art, and while that meant drinks for the three of us while the sun was still up on a February day borrowed from summer, for me it meant guessing that tacos at an anonymous taqueria in Long Beach would be better than any I'd had in two years on the East Coast. And being right.

The Coronas were for two high school friends, one whom I've been fortunate enough to stay close with since, who has been with me in Poland and Pamplona, and far harder places in between, and another whom I've seen far less, but is still someone special in my life. I held her infant daughter a few hours before, remembering vividly us holding a ten-pound sack of flour wrapped in a baby blanket in high school, our shared responsibility during our week-long marriage for a Life Commitments class senior year. The last time I'd seen her I lived in Los Angeles, her adorable newborn just an abstract to daydream of with her soon-to-propose-boyfriend, and the couple the three of us had just seen become husband and wife was trying to make a long-distance relationship work against the odds of youth and yearning.

The ceremony was a further homecoming for me, bringing me back to the church I'd gone to growing up in North Hollywood, attached to the Catholic grade school I attended for my first 5 years in California, where I was classmates with the radiant bride. I graduated that school as an altar boy and returned an agnostic. Fifteen years removed from Sister Mary Bride's scoldings and after-mass breakfast specials at Ernie's Restaurant, I spent the sermon tracing the folded wood of the massive altar backdrop and the snaking concrete arches climbing to surround the bare cupola, thinking (characteristically) about myself and how my nine, ten, eleven, and twelve year-old eyes used to do the same half my lifetime ago. The difference now being comparison. Context. I didn't feel the awe that I did in St. Petersburg churches or Spanish cathedrals, but this actually wasn't all that bad of an effort. Something okay to leave, but never abandon. And here I was greeted with a kiss on the cheek from the collective crush of my entire high school class and a church-whispered "Welcome home" that felt more reassuring than any words that could come from the book on the pulpit.

I was at the reception for far too short of a time. Just long enough to eat, dance with the bride, cram into the rented photobooth with too many other people, and make sure my table was the rowdiest before heading up to Culver City to meet a random assortment of friends for an overdose of drinks. But it was enough for me to discover two things I could carry with me. One, that in a pinch, 2 parts Sprite and 1 part Coke can pass for ginger ale if you don't have the latter around as a mixer. And second, I got to see the bride's parents dance together, a couple that I only in that moment realized stood as perhaps the closest ideal of a marriage to look up to that I'd ever personally grown up around. I had certainly never seen my own parents in that way, and while Julienne's mother and father didn't raise me, they'd fed me enough over two decades to lay some hand in the claim. I also realized that though I loved them, both as real individuals and as an ideal in this moment, I didn't actually know for certain their first names. I'd grown up simply calling them by the Tagalog sign of respect, po. I decided not to ask, nor to go back and check the church program. Their actual names might be shared with other people I happen to know, but in my life that endearment would only ever apply to them.

As Julienne and Andy left for their honeymoon the day after, I recognized that mine was over. My life in New York is no longer the experiment of one's 20s; the box on the checklist has long been marked if I wanted to move on. Five months since my last visit and for the first time it was absolutely clear, not that I needed California, but how I needed it. It's a preservation of a fairy tale. A promise to myself that life could be easier if I wanted it to be- a ripchord to leave dangling for the rainiest of days. It's a lie obviously, one that I'm happy to tell myself because it's one of the very few I'll indulge. If I returned, it would be permanently. My life would become unavoidable, and in ways Californians don't realize, far more difficult than it is now. The Santa Ana winds are more blistering than the gush of displaced air that hits the subway platform eight seconds before the cars enter the station. Cramming onto the 6 train the few times I'm traveling at rush hour is much preferable to sitting in the parking lot that typically is the 405. In California everything is already so spread out. My move just pushed that circumference farther.

I returned to New York as late as possible Sunday night. Hours earlier during my twice-a-year game of beer pong we focused on the excitement of each turn rather than meaningful conversation. Because to do the latter would admit defeat, acknowledge too consciously the separation. No. I'm not coming back. And not that it isn't tempting, because it so clearly is. The Sunday barbecues with Pacific salt air and Mexican beers, the whispered welcome homes. It's an absolutely beautiful life. It just isn't mine. 

Still a half hour to go before the reception started. The television set in the corner of the taqueria was a satellite feed from Mexico of Azteca showing some human interest magazine, like a lower budget version of Dateline. It was muted, so all I could catch on my infrequent glances up were blurry-edged sepia tone re-enactments and the occasional on-screen graphic, chyrons in a semi-familiar language. But my intermediate Spanish was enough for me to easily translate their modest explanation of what would happen after the commercial break. Their one-word promise to be back. Regresamos. "We return." I understood it. I only hope everyone else can too.

The past presents the future.

"There's a hole in my neighborhood down which of late I cannot help but fall." - Elbow

"What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace."  - Joan Didion, "On the Morning After the Sixties"


When the L train goes above ground, the first thing you see is a cemetery. The train pulls into the Wilson Avenue stop in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the only station of the 468 in the New York subway to have one platform inside and the other direction outdoors. Along with the E, the cars of the L are the most modern of the system and at this hour of the day I am one of the few people heading deeper into Brooklyn, so my hungover eyes linger not on the fellow passengers slouched against rails but on absence and the blanket advertisements for Google that monopolize this particular car. The promotions for Chrome push a special feature that allows for private sessions so your browsing history isn't recorded. Our right to privacy being dangled back to us as incentive in the dystopian present. As for my present, I'm rapidly becoming a parody of myself, beginning my third trip in 11 days. A weekend in Los Angeles following 2-day stints in Montreal and DC all for supposed relaxation and pleasure. But if there ever was any to be garnered it's not visible from where I am sitting at 8 a.m. in an empty car of the most modern design the MTA offers with 2 sleeping passengers for companionship, enveloped in Orwellian marketing complete with stick figures to ensure our minds don't miss its simple points and all I have for distraction, for escapism in a world of perpetual escape, are the malaise essays of '70s Didion and in a scratched plexiglass reflection the cemetery comes into view behind me.


My transfer is at Broadway Junction and I take the steep staircase, a packed escalator of motionless people descending beside me in a steady fall. The A train continues my journey back beneath ground and the express passes empty stations of linoleum that I can tell by the font of their names are from the last quarter of the Twentieth Century, the rooms leaning toward a brand of future that never came. By the time the A goes above ground I feel almost grateful, even if the blue skies and Indian Spring of the last 2 days has gone back to a grey ceiling of anonymous time, both of hour and decade.  As the train continues toward JFK it passes something I've never seen or just forgot existed because the only thing stranger in that moment than seeing a casino in outer Brooklyn is seeing one at 8:30 in the morning. Off that subway, it's then to the AirTrain at Howard Beach and its anachronistic patch of marsh, the reeds and monochrome water hemmed between the subway platform and the monorail as a dim reminder to what this land once was. Stepping off the AirTrain I walk through corridors out of a Kubrick film and look out the windows toward JetBlue's Terminal 5, a brand new structure of concrete and glass that looks most like someone picked the Lotus Temple out of Delhi to transplant here and it wilted mid-journey. And I can see the check-in counters on the level below and the balcony above them, upon which a TV crew has set up chairs and an attractive aging blonde is interviewing a man with this stark setting as backdrop, and I know that they're talking but I can't hear what they're saying.

A wall, from both sides.

"He who does not reach the Great Wall is not a true man." - Mao Tse-Tung

"I will tell you this, Lacy, these ancients knew a secret I should give all I possess to secure. They knew their life's meridian, and I still search mine." - John Fowles


Looking back, it's always been accepted that I was born twice. 

My mother and I called it my Chinese birthday. A tradition born of an error in translation, misinterpreting the traditional Chinese belief that children are one year old when they are born. And rather than celebrate my birthday en masse at New Year's, as the other half of that Far Eastern custom would go, the running joke for my mom and I would be an additional phone call, card or email with cutesy quotation marks celebrating the date in 1982 on which I was conceived. 11/11.

It grew into a lucky number, my first pick for a jersey in volleyball and basketball, and later into something talismanic, protectorate, comforting. A promise even in the face of despair that everything would be okay. My grandfather's badge number in the SFPD, the exact minute my mother pulled our rental car into my paternal grandmother's driveway the first time I ever met her, the date in 2009 that my father died. #1111, 11:11, 11/11.

Fitting then that I should type these words from China in November, the 11th month of 2011. A coincidence I didn't realize until weeks after I jumped at an irresistible deal I saw on Twitter: a $459 round trip ticket to Beijing. The symbolism of visiting China during that month and year didn't hit me until I was informing my family about it in person, breaking the news that their impulsive, crazy, prodigal son that had yet to grow up was still impulsive, crazy, and had yet to grow up. 

Really it was just somewhere to go. A nails-biting-into-walls rebellion as I was being dragged away from a waning 2011. An additional cache of memories to add to the year of my lucky number. One more adventure in the year of the bulls. But the full extent of the numerology of it all didn't sink in until tonight. Until I closed my eyes and saw myself staring up solemn-faced and doe-eyed at the summit directly above. Not that 11 was charmed for me, but why that number specifically was so fitting for this one place on Earth. For this precise moment in my life.

Tuesday I scrambled all throughout central Beijing, Tiananmen Square at dawn for the ceremonial Communist Army march out the Gate of Heavenly Peace and morning flag raising, idled through a queue of thousands for Mao's mausoleum, savored traditional Peking Duck at a revered family-run restaurant in a tiny, near-impossible to find back alley, was dwarfed in the indulgently massive Great Hall of the People, paced around the formerly taboo grounds of the Forbidden City, fought biting gusts of winter night air around the illuminated Water Cube and Bird's Nest stadiums of the 2008 Olympics. Wednesday I dealt with logistics for a weekend in Pingyao before I scrambled to the out-of-the-way 798 Arts District and the factory complex-turned-hotbed for contemporary art, deciphered as much Mandarin as I could to find an underground transport depot, sat with my 30 pound backpack on my lap and a heater raging mercilessly against my trapped leg on an overflowing 2 hour bus ride to the outskirts of Beijing, bounced around in the seatbelt-less backseat of a taxi van as it wove along mountain pass roads, driving in the wrong lane around blind curves to pass slower trucks, the stuttery strobe of its high beams the only warning oncoming traffic would have to keep from crashing into us head-on.

And tomorrow. Tomorrow I just walk along a wall. And in doing so, by definition cross that which divides. A monument to separation, or for me, transition. Here (by destiny, or the complex scheme of God, or just the pulse of the world) to achieve the Shakespearean climax. One side of my life on one side of the wall. A day to walk along it. And one side of my life to begin on the other side. Adding the weight of my size 13 New Balances to the pressure of the centuries, the cargo of a billion lives. Standing in the middle of two lives- both rich, both charmed. One of promise, one of fruition. The inherent simple beauty of 11. Or even 11/11. The symmetry of the middle.


I sit on this bed a few miles from the Great Wall of China with an impossible to ignore peace of knowledge that this is it. That every girl I've dated is passing footnote to a love still to be. Every hour at work merely prologue to a position to soon be my career. The end of the ascent, of the antecedent, is tonight. And that my Rubicon is 2,500 years old. 5,500 miles long. And about to be crossed.

(written Wednesday, November 23, 2011.)

= =                     = =

The gloves probably save my life. Or keep my mind free from thinking of impending frostbite for the entire day. Black with a generic clip art golfer icon and the word "SPORT" stitched in red along the back, they're never something I'd wear if I cared about appearance, but today isn't really about self-image. I buy them along with raspberry/blueberry cream Oreos, a squat little can of Chinese Red Bull, and a bag of what looks like picante Chex cereal and I will later discover tastes like spicy uncooked Ramen noodles. I pay the 18 yuan (a little under $3) and add them to the stash in my backpack of apples, raw shelled peanuts, sweet muffins, and water already purchased from another small market next door, one also without visible signs of running electricity. Jackson, the only other person staying at my hostel and my trailmate for the Great Wall, buys a pack of plain Oreos and a lighter. Neither of us smoke, but neither of us wants to hike around isolated sections of the Great Wall in a northern China winter without instant access to the ability to make fire. I put on the thickly-lined fleece gloves and push past the hanging strips of thick clear plastic that serve as a door.


Twenty minutes later we reach the trail that lazily dissolves into one of the oldest surviving sections of the Great Wall, dating back to the Sixth Century, last restored in the Fourteenth. My right glove comes off a decent amount to take photos (though I later perfect the art of taking them with it on), or to dig in my pack for water or a cookie to continue my meandering breakfast. The first time my left glove comes off is to touch it. I place my fingertips reverently and proudly upon the rough stone of the Wall I stand upon, wondering what worker in what century placed that stone there, so that centuries, a millennium later it could form the path that I walk. We stop about an hour and a half into the hike to sit and eat inside one of the abandoned watchtowers. I look out over waves of mountains risen around us and eat a sweet apple made crisp by the November morning cold; Jackson's water has slivers of ice in it from the below freezing temperatures.

Four hours along the top of the Wall, we reach the Twenty-Four Window watchtower. In those four hours the two of us pass only one group of five people walking the other way. I offer a sheepish smile and a "Nihao ma?," the extent of my Mandarin expertise. It is after this tower that Jackson and I will have to temporarily leave the Wall. Just ahead is a zone of it known as Military Zero, and the barbed wire running along the Wall and more modern, recently-manned watchtowers raise our natural curiosity, but our logic holds us back. I turn away from the path ahead to the one I've left behind. An undulating river of stone switching atop the barren hills, miles of noodles come uncoiled. Pride joins beauty and eats my exhaustion. We just did that. A silent admiration from the precipice. Standing atop the highest summit in our panoramic view I look down, back at my abandoned path, my consummated meridian. Aware. Of everything. It's at this point I remind myself that today is Thursday. It's Thanksgiving. I turn and we continue on.

Our detour lasts an hour and a half as we cut through seemingly private land and corn fields dormant for the winter. We lose sight of the Wall, but not thought of it. We finally, anxiously, cut back toward a lesser marked pathway back along the base of the Wall while there is still barbed wire above. This continues for some time past narrower ledges until we find a shorter part of the Wall, some 15-18 feet high with enough bricks missing to form a path up its side. Jackson goes first as I remove the warmth of the gloves and shove them and my camera in my bag. My fingertips touch the stone again, with the same reverence as a few hours before but far more force, enough to support my weight. I look around, then up, and step into the first foothold, and I begin to scale the Great Wall of China.


A bit farther ahead we reach another choice. A sloped decayed staircase about 25 feet down and immediately right back up, with a pile of rubble and rocks at the bottom or next to that a direct pathway, a 20-some-foot bridge of mismatching bricks about 24 inches wide that carries one above the stairway to one side and above a 40 foot drop to the forest floor to the other. Our smiles last longer than our hesitation.

The Badaling section of the Great Wall, the closest to central Beijing, has a movie theater, photo-ops with people dressed in ancient Mongol costumes, and among its hundreds of food vendor and restaurant options are KFC and Starbucks. Mutianyu has a slide for tourists to ride a toboggan down to their waiting cars rather than take a staircase and a hanging cable car making endless loops for tourists that would rather not walk. At Gubeikou there is just the Wall. And you. An opportunity to meet an intrinsic part of myself for the first time, one that's been hiding in the remote Chinese countryside for my entire life. Conceited, but that's all I could ever want; to feel more like myself with every stride forward.

Bulls on parade.

"To keep alive a moment at a time/ But still inside a whisper to a riot/ To sacrifice but knowing to survive/ The first to find another state of mind/ I'm on my knees, I'm praying for a sign/ Forever, whenever/ I never wanna die/ I never wanna die/ I never wanna die/ I'm on my knees/ I Never wanna die/ I'm Dancing on my grave/ I'm Running through the fire/ Forever, whenever/ I Never wanna die/ I Never wanna leave/ I Never say goodbye/ Forever, whenever, Forever, whenever." - Foo Fighters, "Walk"

"There's blood beneath every layer of skin." - Alexander McQueen


I grabbed my passport from my locker and set my backpack by the door. I crouched back down to the bed and softly moved some tousled blonde hair away from her cheek. She stirred, her (blue? green?) eyes still shut as she craned up for our last kiss, one forever framed by intrusions of the Madrid morning light. Our lips parted to form the melancholy smiles of goodbyes and she opened her eyes. (Blue. They were blue).

"Run fast."

She sunk back down to the pillow and her whisper walked with me outside, toward my train to Pamplona.



Two mornings later I stood on La Estafeta, much longer than most streets in Pamplona but equally narrow. I was surrounded by strangers, drunks, the fearful. And I was surrounded by friends. Derek, Nicole, Damian, Mark, Sandev, Nick and I looking at one other with massive eyes, our adrenaline consuming our exhaustion. Seven friends had flown from California to meet me in Spain for the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, and five of them (six now, with Corey's cousin who met up with us) huddled with me in the minutes before the reason for the entire journey. Our encierro. Our initiation into a select set of humanity that together is just the right type of romantic, and just the right type of crazy. Thousands of mornings like this one throughout centuries, but still entirely unique to us. This morning was our turn to run with the bulls.

We broke our circle and stretched out unevenly along the left side of the street, about seventy yards from Dead Man's Corner, the sharp 90 degree turn on the course where bulls skid out and most often become separated, and thus most dangerous. As we took our places and waited for the rocket sound that signaled the release of the bulls, my mind was blank, as it was for most of the run. In the absence of thought, I instead noticed the relative quiet of the streets, of the other runners, but didn't process until later why it seemed, for all its surrealism, familiar.

It's something I know of from writings on Hiroshima, but most major bombs create the same phenomenon. After the initial shock of the blast that spreads outward from the epicenter, an even more violent vacuum sucks all of the air in the surrounding environment back to that one initial point, bringing buildings, cars, skin, everything imaginable, along with it. A wave of energy creating an area of momentary nothingness as the shock bubble collapses. The streets of Pamplona the morning of our encierro were a bomb in reverse. When we left the packed town square and jogged to our starting place on Estafeta, I left behind my thoughts, my sense of humor and personality, all complications in my life. All of that energy fed back into the six cauldron black bulls in the corral, the six brown and white steers with them. The wait and the run itself existed in an aura inhabited solely by the instinctual. The visceral. A world with minimal thought and sound as we waited. The twelve animals that were loosed from their pen became the first part of the bomb; the shockwave that chased us upon Spanish cobblestones.

We seven looked back toward the corner, Derek the closest with his large fist raised some eight feet in the air, I about ten feet behind him, hand raised as I bobbed like a prizefighter, the rest of the group strung behind me, a rosary decade with gapped beads. With the pop of the rocket a wave of thousands poured toward us as we remained in place, chanting our mantra borrowed from the final battle scene of 300: "HOOOOOLLLLD!!!" We were determined to stand in place until we could see the bulls make the turn at Dead Man's Corner, and we caught dozens of wayward elbows and shoulders in what felt an interminable wait. Seconds dripping like honey. My mouth completely evaporated the instant the runners came our way, the moisture gone with everything else not absolutely vital inside me. Over a minute past the first rocket, my wait didn't end from catching sight of the bulls, but the words of a faceless Aussie running by me. "You're gonna want to start running now, mate." There was enough panic in his wheezing voice to convince me, to realize the bulls had already turned that corner unseen and were almost upon us, and my raised hand became a beckoning wave to Derek. "Go, go, go, go!!!" I turned away from Dead Man's Corner and sprinted along with my fellow correadors toward the Plaza de Toros.

My concept of time was a casualty of the vacuum, but for a few seconds my inhaling breaths screamed in my head before I heard the clanging of the bells and the thundering of the bulls' gallop. I turned my head to the right, my eyes inflating with the vision they'd been trained for but still absolutely denied and my deserted brain could produce only one thought. "There are giant.... fucking.... bulls... right there. In the middle of the street?" The shock of it all. That no amount of preparation can insulate you from the abandonment of reason. Your intrinsic determination to deny your senses when confronted with the unnatural. I continued to flee until the moment I most dreaded happened right beside me. One of the bulls slipped and became isolated as the rest of the pack continued ahead without him. I paused along with him, along with time. He turned his head to the left, to where I stood motionless but ready along the wall, remembering in that moment that bulls are drawn to movement above all else. A second and a half that will last until the end of my life. To watch a bull's eye as he thinks. He jerked his head back forward and ran toward the motion ahead, and I followed, rejoining the wave consuming Estafeta.

We didn't pause til we reached the ramp leading down to enter the ring. The bulls all past us now, we bunched up waiting to get through the narrower opening to the arena. We turned to each other in elation, arms around strangers turned allies, chanting "O-le! Ole, ole, ole! O-le! O-le!" with breath we didn't think we had left. The runners moved down the ramp and into the arena and we emerged to stand on the dirt of Pamplona's Plaza de Toros with the audience of thousands applauding us. The closest I will ever come to gladiator. Drinking in the ovation earned for being chased by twenty-thousand pounds of meat and fury and bone. The vibrant banners of red and green, the stark white of most of the correador uniforms around me and the nothingness-brown of dirt kicked-up from the bull ring floor were the only colors around us, and I saw them brighter, deeper, and clearer than anything I have ever seen before. New eyes for a new world, post-experienced-dream. Life as altered by lesson learned well, with a mindset dominated by the confidence that turns clichė fact. What does not kill you, makes you stronger.

A few of us managed to find each other in the madness of the ring, and all of us were together again at our meeting spot, the bust of the American author outside the Plaza de Toros. We huddled up again, our eyes still sprung wide, our smiles wider. We walked back along La Estafeta together, past old cobblestones stained with new blood.

"Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters." - Ernest Hemingway

Saturday afternoon, after the siesta.

I walk outside my hostel, past the Convento de San Esteban where people take pictures and look up as a stork perched up along the naves flaps its wings in a jerking rhythm, just as I watched him do yesterday, and I walk outside the walls of the city, crossing the river Tormes upon which two girls reverse their paddle boat away from the dock, and several benches that overlook the rio are taken by a series of old men in infinite conversation gazing at each other and the water below, as still further down in the grass along the water a couple in matching black bathing suits sunbathes, and I keep walking south of the river and come to a four-lane running track upon which a woman jogs one lap, takes a brief sip from a water bottle she leaves on a bench, and begins to run again, and I continue along a green bike lane as in the opposite direction a father pedals a bicycle with his son in a car seat mounted on the back and he points out features of the landscape to the boy who looks out from under an oversized bicycle helmet and trailing the two at full gallop is a massive grey and white dog who bounds along joyfully with his tongue like a baby's arm streaming out of his mouth, and I turn my head and watch the three continue on their stroll, unable to contain my smile, and after recrossing the river I walk back toward the town, passing two middle-aged men who sit shirtless, wearing trucker hats and tattoos, their sagging bodies the sign of lives lived fully, and past them is a small skate park where a group of teenage boys sits looking at their friend who skateboards along, effortlessly kicks away another board that has rolled up to him without losing momentum, and performs an ollie, and past the skate park people stroll across a centuries-old bridge with a stone statue of an animal worn away by time and with now only the generic stump of a faceless head, and by a small church a couple sets a digital camera on a pedestal, the girl setting the timer before joining her boyfriend for the picture, and then I enter the walls of the city and walk up a small street I've already walked up several times in just over a day, and for the first time notice a stenciled sticker of a Japanese girl on the back of a street sign, while a car slowly rolls past me and the older woman in its passenger seat is about to finish her cone of helado and as I approach the Plaza Mayor a bachelor party is dressed as lifeguards, with the groom-to-be wearing an inflatable Spongebob Squarepants attached to his lap, and his groomsmen wear Dora the Explorer waterwings, and inside the massive Plaza a group of American college students walk by with grocery bags hanging from their arms and a large party of people sit at a series of tables on a restaurant's terrace and a waiter counts their raised hands to know how many glasses of sangria to bring, and in the middle of the Plaza two women in fascinator hats and pastel evening dresses stand reading a text message, and another woman pretends to be a matador with a children's sword and cape and as she swings her arm in an artistic flourish the sword's sheath goes flying and slides along the stones of the square into the feet of the Japanese girls seated beside me on a cement bench, and the woman utters an embarrassed apology as a second bachelor party tries to get the attention of a passing bachelorette party but they strut past unimpressed and their walk takes them past a vendor holding fortysome mylar balloons, more Doras, more Spongebobs and some Patricks for good measure, and I duck into a carneceria for a jamon bocadillo and while the woman prepares it I look around at the large hanging shanks of pig's flesh with the hooves still attached, and as I am finishing my sandwich a wedding party is gathered outside of a church where two of their friends have just become husband and wife and more than anything everyone seems happy in the city of Salamanca. Saturday afternoon, after the siesta.

In concert.

"Miles Davis, I've been swayed by The Cool.
There's just something about the summertime.
There's just something about the moon." - The Gaslight Anthem

"I still believe (I still believe) in the sound
That has the power to raise a temple and tear it down....
Now who'd have that thought, that after all,
Something as simple as rock 'n' roll would save us all." - Frank Turner


I first noticed her because she looked like my friend's ex-girlfriend. The same desert constellations of freckles surrounding tide-colored eyes. Different hair, hers more '50s inspired with a dramatic part. What you would expect from a girl waiting to see The Gaslight Anthem. An indiscernible monochrome tattoo venturing out beneath a rim of white lace and a short sleeve of black polyester patterned in a grid of thin white polka dots. Enough to hint at the visual similarities to the girl I knew but not be overcome by them. But even more a subconscious familiarity. The strangers you've never met that you feel comfortable around.

She stood pressed against a grey barricade delineating a four foot moat of pavement that kept the two halves of the crowd separated for security to roam up and down, occasionally pulling crowd-surfers off shifting platforms of hands, as well as photographers pacing and positioning, hands clutching enormous cameras, lenses like red wine bottles. I was on the other side of the barrier, another tightly-packed individual in that growing audience in a parking lot in New Jersey, the last night sky of April so clear you had to consciously acknowledge it, the lights and towers of Manhattan easily visible some miles off. My 40 minute wait for the band was an impromptu rotation mainly of looking around the crowd, talking to Ryan next to me, and looking down to text. It was with my head down rereading Kyle's message about the show that I saw movement peripherally while also feeling a shifting in the weight against my back. I turned left and saw the girl in the polka dot shirt reaching across that few-man's-land of space and the girl behind me stretching equally hard to meet her in the middle. They each pulled back looking accomplished, the nub of the joint they had handed off so small that I noticed their reaction first, and the girl behind me took about three hits off it while I smiled to myself and turned back to facing the stage.

This was a long festival show, and I rarely do festivals anymore. Coachella would overwhelm and frustrate me, bands that I love performing simultaneously on opposite ends of the grounds while elsewhere pool parties abounded. The judgement of Solomon played out in real life. This was far more manageable. Two acts in The Gaslight Anthem and Frank Turner that I was dying to see, and a few other good bands also performing that I could check out as well, none of my choices overlapping. It gave the day a really casual feel and I spent far less time racing between stages than I did remembering all those outdoor shows I grew up on in California summers. The Sprite Liquid Mix where my friend Mark tried to follow Jay-Z's invitation for everyone to rush down to the pit and got clotheslined and laid out by a security guard. The Warped Tours of high school when A.F.I. was playing a side stage at 3 in the afternoon, and we accidentally saw 311 and Pennywise five times in the course of a summer. My first real concert, a $5 admission at Santa Anita racetrack where bands played on the infield in between horse races and I crowdsurfed for the first time to "Prisoner of Society" by The Living End. That's probably why I wasn't annoyed by all the New Jersey teenagers around. I was too busy thinking of what a little shit I must have been at that age that I will never get to be again.

Brian of The Gaslight Anthem talked about how excited he was to play this show in their home state of Jersey. With tattooed hands and fingers gripping the microphone, he talked about the band still owning the van they did their first tour in and how for this show they loaded it up with equipment like they did years ago and drove everything here themselves because they loved that feeling of nostalgia and their roots. They played timeless rock songs about common emotions we've all felt under a clear summer sky with the Empire State Building visible behind them. And Brian talked before another song about the feeling that being here gave them. "This'll sound fake, but it's not, this is something real. This means a lot to us, and the feeling you give us is incredible. I really feel like you guys are our friends right now. And we're so happy to be here, with you." They launched into another song and the crowd threw their palms toward the stage, had their index fingers in the air for the chorus of "Great Expectations" and as my voice sang along I realized for the first time, after over a decade of shows, that the word concert is the perfect description for the experience. Music is the one true unifying art form. Walk around MoMA or Musee d'Orsay and you'll study the works and think of what you see in them, what elements of them speak to you. Then you can read the little plaque that elaborates on more details or influences and arguments you probably missed. At films we laugh at different jokes or are frightened at differing times by varying types of scares. Some people focus on the cinematography while others analyze the costume design, or the art direction. Think of all the various critical essays a single novel or even poem can catalyze, the arguments about the true meaning of an ambiguous ending. Live music unites us, breeding one astounding composite emotion the entire crowd feels. For those hours, despite all our differences and idiosyncrasies we had before our tickets were scanned and that we will resume again in the parking lot, for the length of those songs we are living in concert. We are one in harmony.

It happened probably a minute and a half after the first time. The Gaslight Anthem still hadn't taken the stage yet. All we had of them was a soundcheck by the drummer and their giant black and white banner featuring the band's name scrawled next to a massive multi-sailed brig forging along upon an ocean of waves. The joint was truly finished, the chemicals in the body and the weed most likely starting to interact now. The girl behind me suddenly reached over the barricade first and the girl with the tattoo and the polka dots craned her arm again from her side of the gap, and this time it was much harder because of what their hands were doing. Each had a closed fist and they struggled until the two sets of knuckles erased the chasm and met in the middle, touching briefly but firmly before retreating back. Their bodies leaned back to where they were standing before, eyes still locked in contact for a few seconds, irises smiling, before turning back to face forward and await the band about to take the stage.

People as places as people.

"It's hard to get hold of, and hard to let go.
Always something we look for from the day we were born.
Instead, we're the people that we wanted to know,
And we're the places that we wanted to go.
Yeah, we're the places that we wanted to go." - Modest Mouse

" 'No man,' said one of the Greeks, 'loves his city because it is great, but because it is his.' " - C.S. Lewis


It was my senior year of high school, so I must have been seventeen, but looking back it seems far longer. I feel I was much smaller then.

I was using my mother's camera, her metal Nikon from the '70s, and only now, typing these words, I realize she might have used it to photograph the same views when she lived here, the same sights that I was visiting then. Our nearly identical green and yellow eyes looking out the same viewfinder to frame the same concrete, twenty some years apart.

The photographs were in black and white; they had to be as I was developing them myself at our high school's makeshift dark room, and I guess I remember the photographs more than the place itself because in my memory the Palace of Fine Arts had the whitewash of Athenian ruins topped in dark grey rather than its actual maple and nougat tones. And it was atop one of the city's many hills, overlooking countless townhouses rising from pavement frozen in undulation. But really, I was recalling the view from Telegraph Hill, or from the apex of Lombard Street, rather than on the water by the Presidio. Returning now, ten years later, to a city I'd been to so often growing up, I was able to see familiar sights with unfamiliar eyes. I was able to see the details that my memory had stored falsely, and to be drawn anew to other virtues I'd glossed over. That decade of absence had been a decade of influence, and with my interests and perspective changed, the variable could now to return to the constant to measure its own deviation. Recognize its progress. See the spots on the map where allure and boredom had traded places. I could see the path I had taken by seeing the city once again.

But that was only a little of it.

I thought that I came to San Francisco to make it easier on Jeffrey and Aaron. As a thank you for their trip down to L.A. when I visited last September, I would come up to the Bay this time around and try to talk other friends in to coming up as well. Our core group of six friends from those immediate post-college years in Los Angeles is now scattered thanks to the three of us. I left in July 2009 for New York, via the world, and they each chose Northern California shortly after.

People continue to ask me if I'll ever move back to Los Angeles, and I've always answered No... That I love New York. True, but only partially the answer. I belong in New York because it fits me; who I feel I am now, and who I want and strive to be. It is a city that, like no other I've ever experienced, pushes you, constantly, to be simply... better. Smarter, wittier, more charming, more culturally aware. I relish this challenge that New York forces upon me, even if the results are subjective, and vary depending on who you ask. But none of this explains the missing part of that answer: the lack of lasting guilt that I felt for leaving Los Angeles. After moving, I had homesickness. Pangs of, if not remorse, then at least of wanting to exist in two places simultaneously. But except for birthdays, or occasional concerts, those are gone now. That burden was lifted and I never thought to ask by whom. I realized this weekend that my friends had unknowingly taken parts of it with them to their new homes. By leaving soon after me, Los Angeles would always be a setting for some of the best casual memories of my life, but no longer the place that I had to live if I wanted to make new ones. By following their own desires, they'd given me far more freedom than they could ever realize.

Seeing Jeffrey and Aaron over the past few days, along with Corey, another member of that disassembled band, was phenomenal, and despite 7 months of being apart, we picked up like it was a weekend away. But it wasn't like old times. It was somehow even more natural. We were finally us. Seeing my friends again, I recognized that they were more than just filled with potential, they were now well on their way towards achieving it. They were more themselves than I had ever seen them, and it was the city of San Francisco that was doing so much to make this happen. Personality alchemy. Juxtaposing what makes a city great, with what makes my friends the amazing people that they are, and watching that marriage become mutually beneficial. They fit there like they would nowhere else, and coming home to New York, I know that I love the Bay Area now not for what I saw back as an adolescent, or a teenager about to leave the comfort of high school, or even solely for its own merits, but really for what it is bringing out in them. So part of why I love San Francisco is part of why I love DC, or Los Angeles for my friends that are thriving there, where some of them truly do belong. Inevitably this means we're destined to be spread out, dots on an unfolding map. But it also means I have the potential to become the same sort of destination to them. The inevitable New Yorker of the group. The brutally honest, hyperbolic, less-than-patient, and yes Aaron, occasionally pretentious one.

There are scores of chasms that form in your mid-to-late twenties. Friends and lovers once inseparable totally dissipate. It's at this point each person becomes the individual they truly are, and opens his eyes to see all the new distance between himself and those that had been around. The natural tendency is to see that alienation, that gaping emptiness, to have that become your focus. Obviously, those ruptures have happened to me in two years of near-exile, across the country from most people I know. But it's all endurable once you see the ones that have moved closer. Because that motion is genuine. It would have to be since it's natural. It's what they saw when they opened their eyes as well.

I used my own Canon Rebel T2i to shoot the Palace of Fine Arts on Saturday afternoon. Irwin was reaching over a chain in a vain attempt to hug a swan, Jeff and Aaron looking around out of brightly-colored Wayfarers, all of us trading instantly-forgotten jokes fueled by the bottomless Mimosas we'd been downing the past hour. We walked around, all inevitably awed by how beautiful the structure was. Even more striking than I remember it being from years ago. And a hell of a lot happier too.