Take a walk through the Mission and you’ll find plenty of things waiting to be written about. Although waiting’s not the right word… shouting, begging, singing, plastered, drying out on the sidewalk's more like it. It’s a loaded district, both in its streets and the words you throw around writing about them. On your walk home in the evening, everyone’s a little loaded. The sun sets and tweakers, as you call them, become harder to discern from commonfolk. The tinfoil hat wearers proselytizing at the smoke bench outside art school camouflage with the other kind of tinfoil littering the ground around them, and the buttoned-up guys extolling the virtues of God’s apocalypsis at BART are pretty much saying the same thing, anyway. At the same intersection, an ex-tech, ex-athiest, ex-Islamic, born again Christian asks you through yellowy, smiling teeth if you’ve heard the good news, and a blanket person babbles assertively that the biggest engineering hurdle was figuring out how to utilize the byproduct of burning methane, which he smells like he could have firsthand experience with. Your feet move, you ingest a little of your brown bagged alcohol, your cheeks flush. The washed out sky changes color, commuters and cardboard sign holders’ paths cross, English and Spanish bleed into hazy Spanglish.
Cool Cat. The line is the most blurred at the nonsober poetry circle that happens on Thursdays, at 16th and Mission, where you sometimes take the opportunity to trade verses with a faded homeless guy, like you, a regular. The rotating cast of poets you’ll encounter, week after week, is young and old, bohemian and bourgeois, and expansively gendered. When you see your guy again, in the daytime, he squints like he recognizes you, but only says, “I’m hungry.” He told you once his name was Cool Cat.
Ancient Aliens. How about the guy on Bryant with the de-wheeled wheelbarrow and trashcan lid drums, suspended midair from a clothes rack? You stood and talked about a rare, supposedly Indigenous 39/40 time signature, as he almost kept count, give or take a couple hits to those Mission-style gongs. You can’t find anything about it online, and wish you could recall more of what he said, which did leave an impression on you. You remember him talking about aliens from planet Earth, then you zoned out. You took his card, actually. He’s an EMF inspector and his name is Zak. It seems like everyone in this city’s techy.
Feliz cumpleaños. Walking by his tucked away, tenement-ish apartment on Valencia, you keep an eye out for your neighbor, Juan, who’s often out there playing keys with a Modelo and a couple extension cords extending from his second floor window. You drunkenly dueted, once, at the end of a long day, joined by a homeless drifter from SoCal, whose only possession was, conveniently, the guitar strapped to his back. It was a mashup of Happy Birthday and Imagine, in honor of your Beatles-loving Puerto Rican friend’s 20th, stitched together with some Afro Latino jazz chords, that had Juan exclaim “Wow!” at its sweet, drawn out, end. In your own experience, like in Latin America, drinking age in the Mission can be whatever you want it to be.
Conejo gringo. Hearing Bad Bunny’s boozy, beautiful voice spilling out of bars, speeding cars, your neighbor’s apartments, and from under the bathroom door, when your roommate’s in the shower, is a mainstay of life on Guerrero St. Wearing your rabbit hat around, you’ve been getting recognized more as a cheap Bad Bunny recently, and less as conejo gringo, both of which are okay with you. At the end of the day, you just like getting a rise out of folks.
Immigrant, Indigenous. You recognize the colorful neighborhood in which you live is still a straggler of sorts in an increasingly boring San Francisco. It’s true that you walk by less and less people every day, and more and more cop cars and Waymos, but at least that’s interesting for you to write about, in its own depressive way. It might be that there’s something equally funny and messed up to all the stuff that strikes you as worthy of documenting, lately. You feel a little conflicted about being this entertained by all the Mission’s idiosyncrasies, during your walk, but decide that if you’re going to gentrify this neighborhood, at least you’re sort of a character yourself. And maybe, at least, one of your neighbors has written about your bunny-eared, drunken philosophizing, throwing up, Spanish speaking, dumb ass, for their own entertainment.
¡Ándale...!
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*I took these a couple months ago and can't find any info on them other than that they were in the Adobe Books backroom gallery at some point (they're not even archived on the site). This was a somewhat informal installation. Super cool though, lots of that Gatorade, opaque Scooby Doo gummy blue.