His new room was adjacent to the living room. In the nights that followed, he would be able to hear the “Dallas” theme song blaring on the TV after his parents had put him to bed. The room also had windows looking out onto the main road outside, past which cars would vroom and screech, and crazies would amble well past midnight shouting “Fuck You!” “NO, FUCK YOU!” back and forth to each other at increasingly large distances.

But on moving day, he sat in his new room, surrounded by the cacophony of things stacked loose in disarray, and fingered the high-pile carpeting, which was gray and scratchy, not brown and low like in his old room. The walls were brown paneling, not painted blue like in his old room. There were four windows, not two, and the ceiling was covered in white tile squares instead of stucco.

As his mother and father worked to assemble his “grown-up” bed, complete with wooden headboard and everything, he sat on the floor and pulled off strands of the strange, wormy carpet. In that moment, the awareness of the inevitability of change overcame him like a rouge wave, and he began to cry.

“What is it? What’s wrong? Do you miss your old room?” His parents scuttled over and surrounded him with anxious questions.

He looked up at them and wiped the tears from his eyes. “I don’t want to die.” He said.

There was silence. His parents stared at each other, and looking back, he would one day understand the silent conversation between them, the one that said: “Shit. We aren’t ready for THIS.”

From the back of the house, his sister’s high keen broke the silence. His mother stood abruptly, perhaps relieved at the timing, and left the room to tend to the baby. His father sat cross-legged on the floor with him and put his big hand on the boy’s knee. “You’re not going to die for a long, long time, James,” his father said. “And even when you do die, you’ll live on in the lives of the people you touch, your family and your friends, and in the work you do—I’ll live on in the lives on my students, and in you and your sister… it’s just the way of things.”

James nodded, and sniffed a string of snot back into his nose. His father’s students would die someday too, along with he and his sister, and eventually, his father would be forgotten. He didn’t say this, though. He thought about growing up, and how he would do something wonderful with his life, become famous and touch the lives of many, many people, so that the whole world might remember him long after he was dead and gone.

“Now,” his father said, rising again to his feet and pulling James up with him. “Where shall we put your dresser?”

* * *

When James was fifteen, he ate hallucinogenic mushrooms for the first time. He and his friends were holed up in Adam Parker’s the garage, which was more of a hangout place/music room than an actual place to store cars.

As the mushrooms took hold, James found himself unable to keep himself from rubbing his hands over his face. The feel of his scraggly teenage beard against his hands sent electric shivers through his palms, all the way through his body and down into his groin. “Now I know why hippies have beards, man!” he announced.

When the walls of the garage started to close in on them, they took a walk around the quiet suburban neighborhood. The night was purple and the moon was full and smiling down on them. The trees and bushes all had red auras, like their life was emanating off of them in waves.

They sat on an embankment and smoked a joint. His friend Terry disappeared for a moment and came back holding a cat in his hands. “Here,” Terry said, placing the cat gently in James’ hands. “He’s hurt.” The cat did not struggle, and as James felt it settle into his arms, he felt something else in his hands, strange and wet and grainy.

“What the fuck is wrong with this cat?” James cried. The strange substance felt like the insides of the cat spilling out all over him, and a sudden panic rose to clench at James’ throat. He threw the cat to the ground and looked at his hands. In darkness, he could see the mushy substance, dark and radiating a red aura. “What the fuck is this!?” he held his hands out to Terry.

Terry collapsed in laughter. “Dude, it’s just sand. Wet sand, man!”

James looked again and worked the stuff through his fingers. Sand. It was indeed wet sand. The cat stood dumbly at his feet, looked up at him and mewled. “You’re a fuckwad, Terry,” James sneered.

They walked back to the garage, James still vibrating with adrenaline. The world seemed instantaneous and unquestioning, and he thought this must be how animals feel all the time—alert, awake, and terrified. “Am I going to feel like this forever?” He said aloud. His friends all laughed.

* * *

Today is his thirtieth birthday, and James is walking home from work. It’s a crappy job with crappy pay that makes little to no use of his art degree. He will celebrate his birthday tonight with a few friends out for a small dinner at a moderately priced restaurant.

Everyone is telling him that life begins at thirty, that you finally start to have a sense of who you are and what you are doing, but James is skeptical. He remembers his eight-year-old self, sitting on the floor of his new bedroom, crying over the realization of death, and he feels just as hollow and lonely. He remembers his fifteen-old-self, holding a cat and a handful of sand, and he feels just as terrified of life and its frailty. Shouldn’t those things have changed by now?

It is a cold and damp fall afternoon, and the streets are glistening with recent rain. The cars on the street make a beautiful trailing sound as they pass, their tires singing against the wet pavement. James cuts through the park, down a path shaded by overhanging trees. He looks at his feet and he walks, his brown leather shoes darker around the toes from the water they’ve absorbed.

When he looks up he sees a feather, white and curled like an apostrophe, floating in the air before him. It arcs towards the earth in pendulum crescents, swaying from side to side like the cradle of his sister’s basinet. And then, buoyed by a sudden updraft, the feather alights higher into the air. He watches it dance, twirling and swiveling like some twined ballerina, held aloft by staging wire and the magic of imagination.

When he was eight he would dream that he could fly. They were vast, epic dreams where his feet left the ground and the air howled in his ears and the earth disappeared beneath him. When he was fifteen he would dream he was famous, a celebrity of ambiguous renown, but known enough to play beer pong with Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston at a frat party on the moon.

These days his dreams, if he remembers them at all, hardly leave the planet. He dreams he is at his job, only it isn’t really his job. Or he is at his house, only it isn’t really his house, and he is talking with his friends, only they aren’t really his friends. James doesn’t have to think too hard on what his dreams mean.

He looks again for the feather and realizes that it has fallen back to earth. It sits on the ground, stuck to the pavement, the white strands turning gray and warping as they absorb the cold surrounding moisture. The moment is over, and whatever might have happened – he missed it.

Book by book, block by block, we stacked ourselves a quaint little two-story Victorian in the lot of an abandoned gas station.

We boiled down more phonebooks into a sticky paste to use as mortar so the place would sit airtight, and used the plastic bags the books came wrapped in to cover the roof and to make the sinks and toilet-bowls. A ball of rubber bands became a perfectly good front doorknob.

When we were done and settled, the air smelled terribly of dry paper and made our noses bleed, but a humidifier was out of the question, as were scented candles. You quoted the old axiom “People in paper houses shouldn’t light candles.”

When the rains came, the fall leaves started to rot in the plastic-cup gutters, and the doorknob started to grow bigger as more and more takeout menus were left by zealous restaurant promoters.

In the winter, we papered the walls with junk mail and debated the merits of officially changing our surname to “resident,” while the cat pawed around inside the flatscreen TV box.

In the spring, the paper beetles found us; their constant gnawing filled the house with a Vesuvian layer of paper-soot and the incessant hum of their digestions became the white-noise soundtrack of our dreamscapes.

By summer the roof had too many holes to mortar up. At nighttime, purple-black light shined through the little bug-eaten holes. Stars polished the darkness with tempting bits of silver, so we fashioned a telescope from paper towel rolls and looked up the constellations on our smartphones. But all we could see were satellites, arcing slowly through the night in their twisting orbital ballet.

When the layoffs came, we boiled down another round of books and fashioned a sludgy alphabet soup that wasn’t too different from the mortar holding the whole place together.

We ate the Aarons and the Abramsons first, and by the next winter we were having the Smiths for both Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.

On New Year’s you grimaced, pushed your plate away from you and said, “If I never eat another Smith it will be too soon.”

When summer vacation came back around, our feet started to itch on their bottoms, and construction started on a new gas station in our lot, so we built a car out of a second round of unused phonebooks.

We gave the car a bio-diesel engine, of course, and after dumping used French Fry Oil over everything, all those Smiths didn’t taste quite so bad anymore.

With some clever rearranging, our phonebook house became a phonebook trailer, and we hitched up our wagons and headed north up the 101 towards the towering Redwood high-rises of the forest.

In Laytonville we stayed with a friend in a treehouse built from unread catalogs. In the guest bedroom we read through our Bed Bath & Beyond pillowcases and ordered what tempted us online with our smartphones.

In Arcata we met a man named Jeremy Anderson and you muttered to me “I think we might have eaten him once.”

You might have been right, but there were over 40 Jeremy Andersons in the phonebook, so we’d never really know which one he was, now would we?

Jeremy told us he was building a spaceship from the plastic packing shells of printer cartridges and batteries and children’s toys and iPod headphones and anything else that needed to be hermetically sealed from the world before it could be purchased.

You looked at me and wondered “now why didn’t we think of that?”

When we left for the depths of the forest, Jeremy asked us if we’d like to subscribe to his newsletter, to keep updated on his spaceship project. We both politely declined; our email inboxes were already too cluttered with spam as it was.

“Now spam,” you said as we made our way deeper into the forest. The trees shot up all around us, misty with fog and dew, while thin shafts of golden light cut throught he canopy and dappled the bark-strewn floor. “There’s something we should really figure out how to eat!”

We settled our trailer-home in a secluded grove of redwoods and ferns that got plenty of afternoon sunlight. You trekked back into town for supplies and returned with a new printer, because it was cheaper than buying a new printer cartridge for the old printer—even though you knew this would make Jeremy Anderson sad, wherever he was.

We printed out the last three month’s worth of spam and prepared ourselves a feast.  For appetizers, we sautéed some “Cialis Without Prescription only $1.55 – USA Express Delivery!” over a bed of shredded “Let’s grow your smallDick with this Effective PenisEn1argement pill xlxa.”

For the main course we roasted some “Rep1icaCartier watches ensuring the highest quality and excellent,” and for dessert, we top everything off with a mélange of messages from disposed African royalty.

After the meal, wiping your mouth with “Pfizer – 80% now,” you looked chagrined and said “I hate to admit it, but I’m kinda craving some good ol’ Smith…”

We snuggled in under our tabloid covers and listened to the song of the paper beetles.  The rainy season was coming, and in the morning we’d have to boil some more phonebooks down to fill all the holes they’d chewed.

But for tonight, we laid on our backs and read the starlight through the tattered the ceiling; the trees above us framed the night sky with their inky shadows and seemed to curve oddly inward, as if they were reaching across the yearning void to touch each other.

We found that old telescope we made and looked up into the sky again and still only saw satellites, blinking solemnly as they spun through their crisscrossing trajectories.

They circled us and circled us and eventually would be sucked back in by the gravity of the world, only to burn up once they came too close and started to enter the atmosphere.

You said, “If I were to die in a tragic accident, I’d like to be crushed by a falling satellite.”

I looked up and wondered if Jeremy Anderson had finished his spaceship yet. We never did get his email address, and he told us he wasn’t on Facebook. I thought that I’d like to get in touch with him, if only there were some way how.

Maybe one of those satellites was really he and his spaceship blasting off into the great, unknown vacuum of space like a modern Icarus with wings of post-consumer plastic and the earth just a shrinking blue-green dot in his rearview mirror – nothing more than another pin-light fleck in the vast, bug-eaten ceiling of the universe.

Dreamscapes

Awake.  Fall awake like trapdoor victims.  From earth-toned dream worlds ticking clocks, gasp awake into slate penumbra of spartan room.  Sunrise shadows cast blue through fog, windows, curtains.  Breathe deep, sunny cuddle of fresh linens.  Roll away beneath blankets, heavy-woven with lead and yawn.  Eyes plat shut, slabs of clay fallen from heights upon potter’s table.

Clocks thickly ticking, faces melting roman numeral drips. What reverie, swarmed by timepieces atop high desert plain?

Her last bit of waking chastises herself for such daguerreotype Dali-scapes.

Wind gusts, clears ticking haze to reveal wide valley below.  Diseased alluvial basin, dry and crackled skeleton plain.  Empty riverbeds branch away and away and away into nothingness, infinite fingers of some alien hand.  Winds hum dirges.

Clouds gather red-black ahead, high above cusp of fan, where barren channels start fractal splitting.  Or?  Where tributaries find convergence?  In dry places of sleep and insinuation, telling fails.

Infant child, babe of glass, there in arms, quiet.  Shivering ants march thousands down arms.  Hold tight to baby in arms.  Sing lullabies:

“Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall,

Ninety-nine bottles of beer,

Take one down, pass it around…”

Clouds rumble mnemonic menace, burst forth erubescent deluge.  Blood spatters across dusty plain, thicker drops than melting clocks.  Glass breaking, glittering cry, and shattered baby—myriad floating crystals—falling up and up into red downpour with it we are falling, falling up again into wakefulness.

Lucy sits up and tosses the heavy quilt aside.  Her hand is at her groin—even through her underwear she can feel it starting.  That dark and sunken shape in her mind from the night before—it rises to the surface and dissipates like vapor, leaving behind a wash of relief, and a hole in the shape of a child.

She hops out of bed and skips into the bathroom, thanking god for her period.  The bathroom tiles shiver glee up her damn beautiful legs and she plops down on the toilet and urinates out the first bright red globules of blood.

Often I take these mornings to revel in my love—remembering the times when my hands graced her curves and folds and her flesh quivered beneath my touch.  But today, I don’t know.  There’s a vacancy carved in me and I feel it most when I look at her.  A cavernous longing.

I float away from the drone of her piss hollowing the toilet water.  Her bathroom’s yellowed wallpaper is waterlogged from shower steam and is starting to warp at its seams and shrug in its corners.  The grout between the floor tiles is black with mildew.  All of the in-between spaces are infected or dying, and here I am, trapped in my own in-between space, watching the only person who makes me feel like I’m anything at all.

She’s still gloating, wiping herself with a fold of toilet paper.  The ink-stain on her hand flashes between her thighs and she thinks of the drinks last night.  Her chest shivers with guilt and hindsight.

My imaginary stomach flips.  Would it be so bad to have our child?  An abortion would be preferable?  Is that with any baby, or is it just mine you don’t want?  No, no, it’s Casper’s you don’t want.  Yes, that must be it.  If it were just me in the picture, well we’d be married with two-point-five and a picket fence by now.  But as usual, Casper is the one to go fucking up the mix again.

In her shower, the faucet knob is reversed.  It turns left for cold and right for hot.  Lucy turns the knob to the left and waits for the hot water with her hand under the gurgling spray—she’s become so accustomed to the faucet’s backwards quirk that when she reminds herself, “the faucet runs backwards,” she actually makes a second compensating flip and runs it “normally,” thinking that “normal” is “wrong” and “wrong” is “normal.”

Lucy thinks this is the story of her life, but I have no idea what she means by it.

She turns the faucet all the way right and the water steams.  She always forgets to tell her guests about the shower’s quirk.  Sometimes they ask, and sometimes they just take cold showers.  Casper, the morning after Halloween, he never asked about it, but the mirrors were fogged up good.  She guesses he figured it out on his own.  Perhaps his shower runs backwards too.

She steps into the shower and the memories pour down over her like water from a scalding kettle.  Casper snakes through her mind, intertwining with Jeff’s hazy, soft-focus dimples.  Jeff’s adoring eyes and sweetly pathetic one-liners.  Casper always said just the right thing, even in those moments when she didn’t know herself what the depths of her mind were hoping to hear.  Jeff’s tongue probing her mouth meekly during that farewell kiss while her eyes stayed locked on Casper, dark and skulking in his shadows.  Casper.  He is suddenly everywhere, plastering the walls of her mind like the swollen bathroom wallpaper.  Casper on Halloween, wild and rabid, his tongue lapping at her navel and all the parts below; Casper drunk and murmuring declarations of love in a voice that didn’t seem his own, pumping away inside of her; Casper fetal and sobbing as he rolled away from her, his come cooling in a pool on her belly.  Casper, the schizophrenic outcast, somehow still haunted by the memory of a brother he never even knew.

Lucy studies the diluted trickle of blood sliding down her leg.  The space where my stomach would be writhes as I watch the trickle swirl the drain.  Lucy turns the faucet all the way back to the left and the water goes frigid.  She turns a quick circle under the icicle claws and slams the knob in.  In the stillness she’s left shivering and gasping for air.

When Lucy was a child she believed in ghosts.  She believed in magic and unicorns and faeries and the world was brighter somehow and the rain was just god laughing tears of joy.  She believed Casper when he said “we” and would ask “well, what does Paul’x think?”  We’d offer to draw her a picture and she’d ask for two, one from him and one from me.  Her chest shivers with more guilt and hindsight.  She thinks she encouraged him, facilitated his madness.  But the truth is, she was the only one who ever believed in me.  I burrow deeper into her mind and pull up those old, hidden memories— back when we were kids, and she believed it really was the two of us sharing one body.

I make her remember:  When we were twelve we climbed that tall black-oak, but Casper got scared.  She called out to me from her perch up there atop the highest branch “Paulie, make him climb!  You guys can do it together!”  The wind rustled and shook the tree and I never knew it until now but she was scared up there by herself.  Looking out across a dry summer valley at the ocean crashing whitecaps ‘til the horizon, and the sound of birds and rustling leaves in her ear, and the smell of dead moss and lichen in her nose, the metallic taste of fear rose in her throat—not of the heights or the shaking branch, but of being up there all alone.  Un-companioned.  The solitary girl in the solitary tree.  “C’mon Paulie!” she called down again.  “I know you can do it!”

And I could.  And I did.  Casper huddled in the corner of our mind and I took control of both sides of the body and up and up I climbed until there I was at the top with her with the breeze and the birds and the ocean at the horizon.  And in her memory the fear washed away like driftwood as soon as I was there—we both remember how she threw her arms around my neck and we teetered in our high-branched perch and almost fell.  Lucy moved her hands to grab the branch between our legs and in her haste touched the young erection taught in my pants.

She said nothing, only widened her eyes and left her hand frozen on my lap.

“Do you… want to see it?”  I offered meekly.

A tiny smile pursed her mouth but then another gust of wind shook the tree and we teetered again and Lucy finally moved her hand down to the actual branch between my legs and cackled laughter and cheered “Hold on!  This one’s a doozy!”  And we sat in the tree with the wind blustering us about, laughing together and holding on for dear life while Casper hid in his corner.  It was our moment, just her and me.

Copyright © 2009, Kevin Hobson

The wind picks up and funnels away the thick seaweed odor and I smell the ocean, cold and clean. It smells of life—fragile, beautiful and rare. A bird flutters gleefully in my chest. I see the children and the mothers and the elderly couple and the dogs, and for a moment we are all fluttering together. There is oneness here. It is the soul—singular—our soul, fluttering within me.  The knowledge overtakes me that death is an illusion. The sun is clear and the sky is pale blue and endless. The universe is pale blue and endless. Life is pale blue and endless, and everything belongs. Even the hot cement and the loud cars and the gaudy beach mansions belong. Even I belong. The ocean consumes the cliff in its slow, methodical way. The cars and the mansions and the hot cement will someday be devoured by the sea, and in this moment everything is perfect.

I’d been reading Walt Whitman and smoking lots of pot. I mean lots of pot. I mean the curled-up-in-the-fetal-position-in-the-dark-of-my-room-listening-to-Abbey-Road-and-reminding-myself-to-breathe-in-and-out-with-my-heartbeat-crunching-in-my-ear-like-a-man-walking-through-heavy-snowfall-and-every-step-may-well-be-his-last-for-all-I-know kind of smoking lots of pot. I was into Eastern philosophy in the half assed way that stoners have, like: “trip out man…everything is nothing and nothing is everything…whoa…”

I wanted desperately to believe that I wasn’t alone in the universe.

On my way back from the beach I stopped by the house of the girl I’d been dating. Over the summer we’d each gone home and returned with new haircuts that had drastically reduced our respective attractiveness to each other. We realized that our relationship was founded on a shaky fault-line of vague physicality.  There was no real connection, though we had spent plenty of time pretending there was. Shorn and embarrassed, we’d been avoiding each other.

We sat on her back porch where the birds sang and the wind chimes tinkled in the offshore breeze, and we drank iced tea from old plastic souvenir cups. The breaking up was easy and we were both relieved.

Her name was Verita, which means truth.

Copyright © 2009, Kevin Hobson

2. I started playing guitar when I was 15. I recently saw my 15 year old cousin and he is already better at guitar than I’ll ever be. I’m still trying to decide how I feel about this.

3. I also started growing a beard when I was 15. It was this terrible Amish chin-strap thing but I was so proud. I still give my family a hard time for letting me get away with it.

4. When I was a kid my family dog-sat for some friends of ours. It was this huge sheepdog named Willie and one night my Dad forgot to tie him up outside and he attacked and killed my cat. I was devastated and still don’t feel like I’ve fully forgiven my Dad for his forgetfulness. But I can tell whenever my Dad brings up the cat and laughs too hard about it that he hasn’t forgiven himself either.

5. I only recently discovered that I love Eggs Benedict.

6. Sometimes when I’m getting dressed I’ll sit on my bed and put my pants on both legs at once. I usually do this on days when I need to feel special.

7. When I was in Junior High my friends and I were way way way into Role Playing Games like D&D and Shadowrun. We were nerds of the highest caliber. There was a passenger train that passed by our Junior High and everyday at lunch we would chase the train, waving desperately at the people on board for the express purpose of making them feel uncomfortable. I’d like to believe we succeeded.

8. I have never been in a fight. I’m still trying to decide how I feel about this.

9. I have also never been hospitalized (knock on wood). Despite this (or perhaps because of this?) I have the capacity to be a raging hypochondriac.

10. I lived in Mexico for the summer between my Sophomore and Junior years of college. Near the end of the trip I was dreaming in Spanish. Still, at the taquerias in the Mission I order my burritos in English, out of some kind of misplaced politically correct decorum. I don’t want to assume they speak Spanish.

11. I worked with people with autism and other disabilities for three years. It was the best job I’ve ever had and I made some of the best friends I’ll ever have. Sometimes I’ll dream about the clients I worked with, the ones who were non-verbal, and in the dream they will suddenly be able to talk, and we’ll hang out chatting about music and movies and shit. They were my friends too, and I miss them.

12. I have no known allergies.

13. I have an amazing repertoire of wiffle-ball pitches (slider, curve, changeup, etc) that I’ll never get to use because let’s face it, no one wants to be the guy who gets all excited about striking someone out in wiffle ball. Unless you’re feeling cocky and challenge me to strike you out. Then it’s on.

14. When I lived in Santa Cruz I had a profoundly spiritual experience along the beach at West Cliff drive where I looked out at the ocean and the sky and realized that every living thing was a part of the infinite universe, that we are all part of one collective consciousness called God, and that death is only a phase-shift to another state of being. I think in a way it was the most terrifying experience of my life.

15. I have been skydiving.

16. When I was very young I spent nearly an entire day pretending I was an otter. My mom took me to McDonald’s and I lay on my back in the booth and ate my hamburger off of my chest. I would have slept in the bathtub if she’d have let me.

17. In High School I won a gold medal for “Interview” at the California State Academic Decathlon Competition. I am convinced the only reason I won is because I was the last interview of the day and when I came into the room I was wearing a hat, which I took off, much to the delight of the interviewing panel. Then a few of my teammates and I dropped acid and tried to order dirty movies from our hotel pay-per-view but our Coach caught us.

18. My favorite movie of all time is probably Zoolander. At least, it is the movie I reference/think about the most in my everyday life. If I had to choose my favorite TV show based on the same criteria it would be a toss up between about 35 different shows, but mainly the Simpsons, Scrubs and Buffy. But I usually keep the Scrubs and Buffy references to myself because the Simpsons is way more culturally codified and I care about things like how I’m perceived by people.

19. In the hierarchy of my addictions, Television is far and away the leader, with alcohol and the Internet trailing distantly and coffee bringing up the rear.

20. I once attended Phish shows on three consecutive nights. If this qualifies as going on “Phish Tour” then yes, I guess I was a Phish-head there for awhile.

21. I love to perform. I have been in several plays, including a series of Monty Python skits and a few musicals. I still maintain pipe-dreams of becoming an actor. I’ve also played in live rock bands since I was 16. Our High School band was called “Blind” among several other names (Trout Fishing in America, Guy Smiley, etc), and my go-to show-stopper move consisted of lying on my back and screaming gibberish into the microphone whilst thrashing my body across the stage. We were fucking punk rock, yo. Now I play bass for a folk singer named John Craigie and am hypothetically working on a solo project of my own songs. Lately I’ve found another performance outlet, which is to read my writing to an audience. People tell me I’m good at it, and for the most part I agree with them.

22. Until I was 15 the only music I listened to was Billy Joel and “Weird” Al Yankovic. Because of this my 80′s nostalgia is warped by the lens of “Weird” Al. Like when I hear the Kink’s “Lola” I still want to sing along “I met him in the swamp down in Degobah, where it bubble all the time like a giant carbonated soda, s-o-d-a so-ohh-da.” Also because of this, rock and roll for me started with Nirvana and Pearl Jam. But don’t worry, I’m all caught up now.

23. When I traveled in Europe after graduating college I went by my middle name, Will. I thought that self-reinvention would help me escape all the things that plagued me. I think I thought the same thing when I moved to San Francisco, that one grand and meaningful gesture could shatter all of my hang-ups and insecurities like magic. Now I know that people are much rarer and stranger things than can ever be fixed by simple magic.

24. I love watching sports. Seriously, it’s embarrassing, but I do. The uniforms, the pageantry, the drama, the personalities. The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat. It’s like war for rational people.

25. I am turning thirty this year and I’m still trying to decide how I feel about all of this. I’m okay being undecided though. It keeps things interesting.

Copyright © 2009, Kevin Hobson

I notice his rat first, trembling on the shoulder of his pinstripe suit jacket.  She sits next to me, her eyes hiding behind Jackie O sunglasses, fidgets with her handbag and I notice her rat too—twitching, pink-eyed, albino-white.

She asks me are you afraid of animals? her words round like marbles in her mouth.

I shake my head no.

She says something about a mongoose and her companion notes that rats have the highest ratio of brain activity to body weight and that he’s seen them playing basketball on Letterman.

I almost say that must be why they use them for all those tests because they are so smart.

But I do not want to encourage these people.

The woman with the rat in her handbag gets into everybody’s business.  She asks the girl across from us what Murukami book she’s reading.  Her words are still slurry but I don’t think she’s drunk.  I’m beginning to think she’s just like this.  All the time.

She and her companion talk to the girl reading Murukami about Kafka on the Shore for a bit, but the girl reading Murukami just wants to read Murukami.

Then she asks the boys drawing tags on the walls of the bus where they get their pens from.  Their ink is thick and purple and the acrid smell of it fills the bus and is not helping my 9:30 am hangover.

I used to do that shit when I was your age, says the woman with the rat in her handbag.

The boys drawing tags on the walls of the bus are ignoring her, talking to some other guy about tags and crews and other thing that make me feel like a yokel.

I remember in High School how all of my friends and I made up our own tags and drew them on the fronts of our notebooks but never actually tagged anything.

The woman with the rat in her handbag asks one of the boys what his tag says.  Asks again and again and again.

Mars, he finally answers over his shoulder.

Her companion is talking to someone about Los Angeles.  He says he loves LA and the woman with the rat in her handbag says no you don’t.  He says he used to live in an apartment behind Mann’s Chinese Theatre.  His rat is in the inside pocket of his coat now, cleaning itself.  He says he wants to do that Nick Cave thing of waking up every morning at 5 am with his typewriter.

The girl reading Murukami gets off the bus.  The boys drawing tags on the walls of the bus draw more tags and criticize each others’ work.  The man with the rat in the pocket of his pinstripe suit jacket says art is rad.

I think that all of this would make a great story or something.  If only there was some other level, some deeper element about the chaos of the city and the grimy collision of lives.

And then the man with the red sweatshirt gets on the bus.

The woman with the rat in her handbag sits bolt upright in her seat.

I SEE YOU, FUCKER! She screams out at the man.

The man with the read weatshirt is unwrapping a Swisher Sweet and does not look over.

I KNOW YOU! YOU FUCKER! I’LL KILL YOU!! YOU’RE A DRUG DEALER AND A RAPIST!

There is silence on the bus in the spaces between the screams of the woman with the rat in her handbag.  In the very front people crane their necks backwards to stare wide-eyed.

The man with the red sweatshirt does not look at her.  He looks at the rest of the bus and smiles a big shit-eating grin and bobs his head and shrugs his shoulders.

YOU RAPED TWO OF MY FRIENDS!! YOU TOLD THEM YOU’D GIVE THEM DRUGS AND WHEN THEY CAME UP TO YOUR APARTMENT YOU SHUT THE DOOR BEHIND THEM AND THEN YOU FUCKED THEM IN THE ASS!!

The man with the rat in the pocket of his pinstripe suit gets up from his seat and goes and stands right in front of the man with the red sweatshirt.  As if to either shield or intimidate him.  I can’t quite tell.

YOU’RE GOING TO GO TO HELL, FUCKER!! YOUR’RE GOING TO GO TO HELL AND BUUUUUUURN!!

The woman with the rat in her handbag has pulled off her Jackie O sunglasses and her blue eyes look dead and glassy.

The man with the red sweatshirt finally looks at her and simply says that ain’t me.

I KNOW IT’S YOU, FUCKER. I KNOW IT’S YOU CAUSE WHEN I THINK OF HELL I SEE YOUR FACE, BURNING THERE! YOU’RE GONNA GO TO JAIL AND SOME WARDEN IS GONNA SHOVE HIS STICK UP YOUR ASS!! BUT YOU’D PROBABLY LIKE IT CAUSE YOU’RE A PEDOPHILE AND YOU FUCK LITTLE BOYS!!

The bus stops and the Indian Summer morning sunlight reflects off a silver car right into my eyes and even when I close my eyes I can see the light, red with bloody veins through my eyelids.

The man with the red sweatshirt gets off the bus but the woman with the rat in her handbag keeps screaming away at him as the bus hisses and groans and pulls off down the street.

She tells the boys drawing tags on the walls of the bus how he rapes white women.  She says she knows their names but won’t name them out of respect of their privacy.

Then she names them, Kim and Karen.

The man with the rat in the pocket of his pinstripe suit jacket is trying to calm her down saying yeah we got it, you made your point, we got it, but he’s gone now.

But the woman with the rat in her handbag says no he’s never gone FUCKER he’s never gone.

The boys drawing tags on the walls of the bus shake their heads slowly and mutter things like that shit is fucked up.

We all shake our heads slowly and think things like that shit is fucked up.

My stomach gurgles with acrid pen fumes and all the other thicknesses in the air.  I try to remind myself about innocent until proven guilty.  I don’t know how to feel about this crazy screaming woman with the rat in her handbag.

But there was something about that man with the red sweatshirt and his big shit-eating grin.

I get off the bus two stops early and walk away home down the dirty city street.  The sidewalk sparkles like sidewalks in the Mission often do, and I kick the air around the clusters of bobbing pigeons so that they hop and scatter themselves away from me.

Copyright © 2008, Kevin Hobson

I get so nervous on BART when we go under the water—I talk and talk and talk to anyone and everyone.  The other day I had to take BART to the East Bay because my car was on the fritz.  The starter was busted, or something, the darn engine wouldn’t turn.  There was no spark, no connection.  I must’ve sat there chugging and chugging at it for a half-hour that morning.  Probably flooded the thing, but I knew that wasn’t the only problem.  So it was to the mechanic with the car and there I was stuck riding BART.  I was running late that day and afraid I’d miss my transfer, so I was extra nervous.

Now, there was this elderly Chinese woman on BART that day.  I sat next to her.  She wore one of those pink and purple neon windbreaker outfits that look like they’re made of paper and they crinkle and swish with every move?  The sound would drive me crazy, but I guess she couldn’t hear it because she was Deaf.  I could tell she was Deaf by the piece of paper that was bobby-pinned to her head, tucked right in there with her thinning hair, a torn scrap that said DEAF.  Strangest thing.  You’d think a tag on the shirt or something would do the trick, but the note was pinned right there to the side of her head, just like that.  Her face was mottled with liver spots and her hands were folded like birds in her lap and she just sat there, staring out the window, silent.

She was a great person to talk to.

And I wondered: Do the Chinese Deaf use the same sign language as the America Deaf do?  I mean, do you think they can all communicate with each other, or only if they speak the same kind of sign language?  I asked the old woman about it, but she just looked at me and pointed at the sign on her head.  I kept talking though.  I was nervous—we were about to go underwater.  “I’d like to think it all works the same,” I told her, “otherwise you’d see Deaf people getting into silent fistfights over silly misunderstandings, you know, like one Deaf person’s ‘Hello” is another deaf person’s ‘I fucked your mother!’”

I felt so bad when I said that last part—there were children on the BART with us, a mom with her baby in a stroller and two little kinds bouncing around on the ugly BART seat cushions.  I never like to swear around children, them being the future and all.  I apologized to the woman, too loudly I guess because everyone in the car looked at me all of a sudden, everyone except the Deaf Lady who just stared out the window.

I kept talking, because the BART was underwater now, I could tell by how my ears get plugged up and I asked the Deaf Lady if she could feel her ears getting plugged up too. She just looked at me and pointed to the sign on her head again.  I told her about how nervous I was and how I hated the tunnel when we went underwater.

“I’m okay with a tunnel when it’s running underneath the city,” I said.  “The MUNI is no problem.  It’s just the underwater part that gets to me—somehow all of that concrete and steel overhead seems far more stable than a million gallons of water, you know?  To me, ‘underground’ evokes secret clandestine safety, while ‘underwater’ means drowning to death.  I guess I worry about making across, about the transition across the water through that unnatural connective tube.  I feel like I’m neither here nor there.

“I’ve never been afraid of bridges, though.  I trust them.  Why do I trust bridges and not tunnels?  I don’t know.  Maybe it’s because a tunnel is a negative space cut through the solid world, while a bridge is a solid piece stretched across a negative space.  It seems more natural, more meaningful somehow.  I blame politicians.  They always talk about building bridges, I guess the rhetoric just stuck.  You never heard anyone talking about digging a tunnel to the twenty-first century, that’s for sure.

“Digging tunnels,” I told the Deaf Lady, “that reminds me of a story from when I was young, how my friends and I were playing that age-old rite-of-passage game where we tried to dig a tunnel to China.  I wonder if you tried to dig tunnels to America when you were a little girl.  Is that a universal thing?

This is the story I told her:

We were what, eight, nine?  It was my friend’s backyard, he had a house in Twin Peaks—the only friend with a real dirt backyard so we were over there all the tome, you know.  We’d dug maybe three feet down, when my friends’ older sister caught us.

‘What the hell are you dorks doing?’

‘We’re digging a tunnel to China!’

‘Don’t you learn anything in school?’  I remember the tone of her voice, like how much smarter she was than us, it made me drop my little metal digging spade.  ‘First off,’ she said ‘that’s not a tunnel, that’s just a hole.  You can’t call a hole a tunnel until there’s an “other side,” somewhere for the light to come through.  That’s why they say “The Light at the End of the Tunnel,” and not “The Light at the End of the Hole.”  And secondly, did you ever look at a globe?  You manage to dig a tunnel to the other side of the world, well, besides probably winning Nobel prizes, you’d end up at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, and all the water down there would drain out like an emptying bathtub and then spout up here like a geyser and flood the whole state, and how fun would that be?’

‘Cool!’ We all started digging with renewed enthusiasm.  The sister sighed dramatically and went inside.

Of course, we never did turn that hole into a tunnel.

“Maybe that’s why I like bridges better than tunnels,” I said, “because I like the idea that at least an unfinished bridge is still kind of like a pier, jutting out into the water, that even without a connection it can still have value.  But an unfinished tunnel is nothing more than a hole in he ground, one more empty thing to fill up again.”

But the Deaf Lady was slumped over in her seat by now.  I guess she’d fallen asleep.  I’d love to be able to sleep like that on BART, but that high-pitched whine keeps me awake.  Another reason I like bridges better.

“My uncle is terrified of bridges, though, and so is my mother, to a lesser extent.  I guess it runs in the family…maybe it skips a generation?  Maybe my kids, if I ever have any, will be terrified of bridges too.  And maybe my grandkids will be afraid of underwater tunnels.

“In a way,” I told the sleeping Deaf Lady, “that’s a kind of soothing idea.”

“Now, my uncle is so terrified of bridges and when his job moved from the City out to San Rafael a few years ago, he moved his whole family over there to follow it, just so he wouldn’t have to commute across the bridge every day.

“I asked him once why he was so afraid of bridges.  He said that when he’s up on a bridge, especially a high up bridge, he gets dizzy and panicked, like vertigo, from being so high up above the water, and he starts to feel like he might lose control of the car and swerve and plow through the railing and crash into the water.  Ker-splash, you know?

“But here’s the thing: all that stuff isn’t really what freaks him out about bridges.  Sure the vertigo and the fear are uncomfortable, but he knows that he’s not going to lose control of his car.  He trusts himself enough to make it through the fear.

“The part that really scare him, get this, is the idea that there’s someone else driving on the bridge, at the very same moment who has the very same set of anxieties, the same vertigo, but who can’t make it through the fear, who will lose control of the car, who will crash, of course into him, and kill them all.  And it’s that idea, of the uncontrollable other, that really scares him about bridges.

“My aunt joked, ‘He’s just as terrified of letting me balance the checkbook.’”

The sound of the BART changed then, as we came up out of the tunnel and into the daylight.  “Well, looks like we made it through this time,” I said to the Sleeping Deaf Lady.  “Thanks for listening, well, you know what I mean.”  My stop was coming up next—I had to transfer trains, so I shook the old Lady awake, so she wouldn’t miss her stop.  But she didn’t wake up.  I shook her again and my hand crinkled against that ugly neon tracksuit, but nothing.  I put my fingers under her nose—she wasn’t breathing.  I was about to tell someone, call for help, but then the BART slowed to a stop and the doors slid open.  I left the Deaf Lady sitting there in her chair, slumped to her side, her mouth dangling open.  What could I do?  It was my stop, and I had a connection to make.

Copyright © 2008, Kevin Hobson

A mouth pulls in air and hot tea with a breathy ‘hoop’ sound.  Lips and tongue are scalded, and the bone china teacup is set back in its saucer with a hasty clink.  The train rumbles and shakes along the track and the teacup rattles in its place on the table in the dining car.  The tea sits in the teacup, breathing steam, choppy with little golden hot waves.

In Poughkeepsie there is clear water in a stainless steel teakettle and a cellophane-wrapped pouch of gauzy paper filled with dry leaves.  Before that there is rain and a seed in the ground.  In Newburgh there is hot tea scalding lips and tongue and in Yonkers there is yellow urine pushing against the round of a bladder.  In New York there is a seat on a toilet and a satisfied groan.

A man with a newspaper flips his business section like an old maid snapping a clean sheet across a half-made bed, and the crease in the center of the paper stands at attention.  In Poughkeepsie it is the sports section.  In Newburgh it is business and in Yonkers it is the obituaries, where the amn sees that his high-school sweetheart was killed last week in a car accident.  He feels sad for a moment, and then congratulates himself for riding the train.  Across the way he sees a woman sipping her tea, her face a hasty grimace as she sets the cup back in its saucer.  In New York he tosses the paper in the trash.  The paper is a tree.  The paper is a blanket for a homeless man.  The homeless man is a boy, a father, a corpse.

The woman sipping tea has cold hands, has always had cold hands, will always have cold hands.  She wraps her fingers around the teacup, wincing at the sight of her knuckles, which she thinks are too bony.  The heat of the tea through the bone china warms her hands.  Her eyes close and the warmth creeps into her too-big knuckles.  Her too-big knuckles stretch against the heat and expand larger still.  The knuckles swoop and close fingers around metal jacks and open fingers again to catch a rubber ball.  The knuckles hold fingers tight around needles to pull thread and stitch fabric.  The knuckles swell and creak with arthritis.

The woman opens her eyes and sees the man with the newspaper watching her.  The corner of her lips arc in a smirk and the man’s lips do the same before he rustles his paper and feels the dry smell of ink rubbing off on his fingers.  His knuckles are small, too small he thinks.  In Yonkers there are lingering glances, in New York there are words and cards exchanged.  There are calls, dates, too-big knuckles and too-small knuckles interlaced, bodies interlaced, babies, laughter, tears, and a sunny breakfast nook where morning newspapers are read and hot tea is sipped.

The woman lifts the teacup off the saucer and holds it against her lower lip, breathing out air across the surface of the tea.  The golden tea ripples with hot little waves.  Steam rises and condenses on the window, beads into droplets and rolls to the sill.  The woman sips cautiously, making a breathy ‘hoop’ sound and funneling the tea through the circle of air inside her lips.

Copyright © 2008, Kevin Hobson

Whatever it is that compels you, listen.  Go.

Bring what you will: a purse, a wallet, your keys, or a cell phone (if you must), but realize that you will not be needing any of them. Those forgotten ghosts of wanderlust, after all, require few utensils.  Maybe you’ll think again of Thoreau’s Walking, that “if you have paid your debts and made your will, and settled your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk,” and you won’t bring anything at all.  But take your things with you if they give you comfort.  Thoreau, after all, had a lot fewer affairs to attend to on that pond in Walden.  And the hippies will understand.  They all carry cell-phones nowadays anyway.  In any case, as you leave your house, (or more likely, your apartment) try and disregard your notion of destination.  Where you are headed is not a place that can be arrived at by placing heel-to-toe.

And do not bring a jacket.  There should be enough sun, if you have chosen the day correctly, so that, for the most part, you will not need it.  You will need sunglasses, though.  Even if it weren’t a bright day, you would still need them.

You might be tempted to start your walking in the Haight—it would seem a logical choice.  All that history, all the colorful characters, surely you will find whatever it is you are looking for there.  Resist this impulse.  You will find nothing but ghosts and clichés there.  You might also be tempted to head towards the Mission, or the Castro, if you are so inclined, but again, these places just won’t do for this type of walk.  Too easy; too obvious.  Where you need to be is in the forgotten heart of the City.  Start at Market Street, walking up past Van Ness.

Feel the proximity of strangers around you, and let your arms ripple with gooseflesh if they come too close. See how the light glints off the gilded dome of City Hall, casting opulent sparks against your eye. Study the ripples of traffic that wash through the intersections, and breathe in the city odors: the car exhaust and sticky urine and rotting cigarette butts.  Count the Starbucks that you see.  Count the trees.  Keep walking.

Your pace should be brisk, your strides as long as your legs will allow them.  This is no country stroll, no saunter. Weave your way through the crowds.  Zig zag, dodge, pass on the right.

See if you feel frustrated by the dawdling packs of tourists with their maps and flashbulbs, if you stutter your steps behind them, wait for an opening, and then go.  Notice the way the crowd parts for the two-way foot traffic.  Notice who makes way for whom, and who holds their courses.  But don’t think about it too much.  Resist the impulse to generalize.

Maybe you feel strange, rushing so heedlessly through these packs of your fellow humans.  Or maybe it feels natural and correct.  Is there a tinge of guilt in your indifference, or that faint echo of love tugging again at your heart?   Ask yourself as you walk what Thoreau would say if he were with you.  Or those hippies from back in ’67.

Imagine they say: It’s the death of meaning, and the execution of interpretation. That’s what’s different now, that’s what’s changed.

Keep your pace steady as the crowds thin, heading up Market, just past 10th, where there seems to be more garbage now, more smells, and more shifty strangers, huddled on cardboard palates or leaning idly against streetlamps.  And maybe you notice that even the trees here are struggling, shaded on all sides by the chasm of the rising city.  Check the sketchy-eyed derelicts and feel nervous if you will, afraid if you must, but don’t speed up your walking.  Just maintain the quick, even pace of a person with a place to be.  And remember, there is no eye contact permitted, with anyone, at anytime.  That’s why you need the sunglasses.

Make up the worst possible story you can about the next bum you see, how he killed his family with a power drill and now begs for change to buy brandy for the tempting of young schoolgirls back to his dingy lair.  This is just an example.  Go ahead and slap your preconceptions on him for a moment.  Really try and let the horrors spill forth.  Then try a tale that’s the polar opposite: a hard-on-his-luck family man, maybe stricken with cancer, or with a kid so stricken, his house repossessed by hospital bills, forced into this humiliation of scraggly blankets and an empty coffee cup.  Realize that the truth is locked away behind those glazed eyes, behind that matted scraggle of beard.  Think about asking him if he’s settled his affairs and is ready for a walk.  Ask him if you must, but remind yourself about the death of meaning, the execution of interpretation.

And keep counting the Starbucks.

Hustle past the porno theatres and the head shops.  Perhaps you feel conspicuous here, because your clothes or the color of your skin contrasts with those around you.  Let yourself feel conspicuous.  Let it roll over you.  Feel the eyes burning holes through your clothes, and then get over yourself.  Nobody gives a fuck.  Remember the bums you just passed, see if you can find that echo of love in your heart when you look back at them.

Notice now that the crowds are thickening again with tourists and business people, well-dressed folks, and that the store facades are becoming friendlier, emblazoned with familiar brand names.  Pay attention to how this change makes you feel.  Relieved?  Or more conspicuous?

Watch the shoppers with their arms akimbo, elbows hooked with laden sacks, chatting to each other or to the electronics in their ears.  Eavesdrop on their conversations while you wait for the light to change.

This should be the only time you stop moving, to wait at a corner.  Watch the crossing signals with their white men and red hands.  Pay attention to the numbers counting down on the signal perpendicular to you: they will tell you when it’s time to move.  Jaywalk with the packs at first, until you get the hang of it.

You’ll have to start weaving through these crowds of shoppers and tourists again to continue up Market Street.  Make up some more stories about them if you must, and then reverse your preconceptions.  The tourists are locals, and the locals are tourists.  The blonde businesswoman in the brown power-suit has a crack habit and a fecal fetish.  The low-pants kids blasting Hip-Hop are Christian missionaries from Ghana, bringing the word to the street.  Whatever it takes for your perceptions to be skewed.

Maybe by now you’re noticing how if you walk up close behind a lone woman you can sometimes feel the hairs on the back of her neck prickle.  Stutter your steps, pass on the right.  Keep counting Starbucks.  Keep counting trees.

As you continue up Market, you should soon notice a break in the buildings, a flourish of grass down the end of a wide walkway, just after the only café that wasn’t a Starbucks. Turn right.  Notice the metal benches in groups of three as you pass through the walkway of fresh concrete and shiny marble.  Maybe you notice two strangers sitting down on one of the rows, the middle bench empty between them.  Maybe they are all full, or all empty.  Notice the metal elbows bolted over the edges of the planer boxes and retaining walls to keep the skateboarders at bay.

Think if you must about the distance between things, and then ask yourself about the death of meaning, about the execution of interpretation.

On your left there should be a brick wall coming into view from behind the gray high-rises that cast the walkway in shadow.  At first the wall may appear to be part of St. Patrick’s, the brick church sitting at the end of the walkway, but as you get closer, you will see that the section is not connected at all, rather it is just a lone segment retained by rusting pipe buttresses, the fourth wall of the world’s stage removed and placed here for storage.  Ask yourself if you think love can still exist in a world where the fourth wall has been removed, where meaning is dead, where interpretation has been executed.

If you continue down to the end of the walkway you will reach Mission Street, with the Yerba Buena gardens directly across from you.  This is the grass that tempted you down that breezeway in the first place, but you will not take time to linger here.  Steal a few glances at those lazing in the sun. Try and forget about your categories: bums, lovers, students, hipsters, hustlers, tourists.  For a moment just let them all be exactly what they are: people, lying on the grass, in the sun.

Now turn left and keep walking, up Mission Street, past the sliced cylinder of glass rising from the MOMA.  Maybe the sun shines a little brighter off the building’s façade.  Maybe it’s obscured in shadow.  Maybe you start to notice that the cross streets are approaching zero, and start to feel as if a countdown is waning. Let your curiosity get the best of you, go ahead and wonder what street will come after First.  Maybe you hope that it’s Zero, and maybe you feel disappointed when it is revealed to be Fremont.

Or maybe not.

Keep weaving your way down the street, briskly still. Follow the sidewalk as it curves into a crescent to dip into the Trans-Bay Transit Terminal. Go ahead and put on a show of meaning to do exactly what you just did, taking the long way around like that.  Or you can pretend to be a new person, just off a bus or train or ferry, as you merge again with the crowd you left at the beginning of the sidewalk’s arc, those who carried on directly across the mouth of the concrete inlet.

How does it feel to be new like this?  Liberating?  Or terrifying?

By now you might be feeling the urge to slow your pace and crane your neck upwards, to take in the towers of the financial district.  Resist this impulse.  Glance up if you must, but do not slow your pace.  Stutter your steps, pass on the right.

Remain nonplussed.

Turn left when you reach the gold boat propeller that guards an alcove of bank ATMs.  Venture deeper into the financial district, but remember about not looking up.  The crowds might be thinning a bit, or maybe it is lunchtime and they are chaotic.  Pay attention to how you feel.  Do you feel conspicuous here?  Overwhelmed?  Do your clothes or the color of your skin contrast with that of those around you?  Let these feelings wash over you, whatever they are.  Perhaps they are familiar feelings.  Perhaps foreign.  Perhaps the echo of love tugging at your heart is fading like the wisps of fog around you, burnt away by the green heat of money and Starbucks signs.

By now the wind has probably picked up, tunneled down through this canyon of industry, peppering your arms again with gooseflesh.  Maybe you’re wishing you had your jacket.  Go ahead and wish.  Keep counting trees, and keep counting Starbucks.  You can also go ahead and look people in the eyes here.  There is no danger of them returning your gaze, no threat of eye contact.  Notice how everyone is wearing sunglasses.

Look right as you cross Market and see the Ferry Building, obscuring a view of the ocean.  You might want to linger and sigh at this sight, but keep walking.  The sidewalks get narrow here, crowded, but the sun has returned. Dodge the pedestrians removing their jackets, stopping to tie the arms around their necks or waists, dodge the other ones untying their jackets from their necks or waists, slipping arms in awkwardly.

Maybe your legs are starting to quiver in spots, maybe your knees are creaking a bit.  Maybe the buildings are starting to blur together in a wash of scaffolding and colorful signage.  Maybe you’re starting to understand this whole “death of meaning” thing.  Find someone who walks as briskly as you do and follow a few yards behind them for a while.  Notice how they move, navigating their way through the short city blocks, crossing at whichever light is permissive, swapping sides to avoid the orange construction zones.

Wander your way past California Street, past Montgomery, up to where tourists snap photos of the concrete lions guarding the red gate into Chinatown.  Maybe you have walked in Chinatown already, maybe not.  Go ahead and stop to look up the hill at the shops and paper lanterns, and then turn left and head back down the hill.  Save Chinatown for your next walk.  There are different rules and different expectations across that red gate.  Walking there is an advanced technique.

Take your time making your way back to Market.  Avoid the big hills.  Maybe you find it ironic that Bush is a slighter grade than California.  Maybe you don’t.  Maybe you think about the execution of interpretation and laugh.

Try to find the empty streets, or the ones with just a few idle standers.  Try to find whatever scares you.  But remember: it’s daytime.  Don’t insult the nighttime by lavishing an inordinate amount of fear upon the day.

Stay on the other side of the Market as you head back to Van Ness.  Notice what feels different, and what feels the same.  Maybe you walk right up behind a lone woman, just to watch the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. Maybe you walk in a straight line now, letting those who approach weave and stutter to make their way around you.  Maybe you take a moment to stare at the beggar whose eyes are opaque with cataracts, pull off your sunglasses and allow your gaze to pass through the line of his blindness, feel the echo of love from that lost, mythic summer resonating through your core.  Maybe you notice the grungy man with a full coffee cup, his hands shaking and spilling the hot coffee all over his clothes, and wonder: DT’s? or just a way to let people know his cup is full, so they don’t spoil his drink with their loose change?  Wonder all you want.  Wonder what was meant by the death of meaning, the execution of interpretation.

Think about the stores with the strange names and the stores with the familiar names, and the people, strange and familiar too.

You most likely counted more trees than Starbuck’s, but go ahead and count the approaching Starbuck’s again, even though it was the first one you counted as the walk began, because surely you missed one at some point along the way.

Copyright © 2008, Kevin Hobson

The neighborhood is still reeling in the wake of the tragedy. Surviving Hipsters–those who were either waiting to get brunch at Boogaloos, drinking bloody mary’s at the Zeitgeist or simply sleeping off their all-night coke binges at the time of the catastrophe–were understandably shaken by the news.

“My buddys Chase and Diego were at the park that day…” local Hipster Joe John Jacobs noted somberly, wiping his tears with his over-sized neckerchief, “I, I was supposed to meet them but I stopped off at Gestalt for a beer on the way…it really makes you think…on the plus side, Chase told me once I could have all his Lou Reed vinyl if anything ever happened to him…so that’s kinda sweet.”

Tallie Woods, another local Hipster, seemed to display survivor’s guilt when asked about the accident. “I wish I would have been there…dying in a freak meteor strike is totes gonna be the new trend…I was saying it last fall, but everyone just laughed at me. Ha, well who’s laughing now! Gosh I’m so jealous of all my dead friends. How cool are they?”

In lieu of flowers, surviving friends have asked to borrow a fiver to help them all get tickets to go see some Vampire-named band you’ve never heard of that’s like, totally big in New York right now.

Copyright © 2008, Kevin Hobson