March 7th, 2005
111017870363174517
Awash in memories and mass-market paperbacks
10:23 p.m. PST
I had forgotten how beautiful California is– the rolling mountains that surround the 101. Clacking along at seventy five miles per hour in a scuffed up minivan reminded me a lot of when I first came to the west coast looking for a bigger future.
I’ve been chest-deep in memories of ex-es since I first stepped out of the hotel at ten this morning (five a.m. Monday by my body’s count). Downtown San Francisco is small, and I vividly recall covering it well when on our ETC west coast field trip three years ago. It seems like I’ve been to virtually every mentionable pub and piano bar in the convention center area, each dog-eared as a brief stop following in Amy’s adroit socio-professional footsteps. Walking past the Moscone Center and the Zeum, I looked down Howard Street into the hazy skyline of SOMA and I could almost see the stuccoed Hotel Britton, our old haven from a hard day of alumni networking, nestled snuggly among methadone clinics and the world-famous Omnicircus.
I bought about sixty dollars’ worth of paperbacks at Borders. I now have enough reading on Japanese feudal wars and bushido to last me until the summer. I also picked up perhaps my favorite Kerouac novel, the degenerative Big Sur, along with R.A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land [Fitting, no?].
Now I have SPF 50 sunblock for the summer. Now I have unwaxed dental floss at less than six dollars a roll (a concept foreign to Japan). Now I have two unintentional pounds of Morton salt. Don’t worry, I’ll think of something poetic to attribute their purchase to and bestow them with the utmost reverence to a friend back home– in Tokyo.
When standing in front of a wall of history books, I sometimes am struck with the singular, intense realization of each and every life contained within –the children that became adults which had children and died loving and being loved–, then I gasp and shudder confronted with the incomprehensible spirit of mankind.
