catastrophic days

That is a photo of a dead, somewhat flattened pigeon shoved into a grate, headfirst. Encountered FRIDAY night at the corner of something and Valencia. Pretty devastating. And yesterday (SATURDAY) I saw two more, as I was biking around. Those two were much flatter, small raised discs of pigeon that I rolled by on the asphalt as I rode home from the grocery store.

On MONDAY I went to my cousin's house where they have satellite tv, and on the news there were stock market line graphs flashing downwards across the screen. Seems the market "has an upset stomach," as my father described it yesterday on the phone. And last night I was sitting in front of the same television again. We were watching something called "No Comment" on Euronews, a show that consisted of video coverage with no commentary, not even in a language I can't understand, not even scrolling across the bottom of the screen. There was footage of a mob of black-hoodied people in Prague, beating each other up, against grey walls. And then the cops showed up and then it switched to somewhere in the boondocks of Turkey, where peasants set up camp and hauled things against a stark desert. In the distance behind their tents, there were dunes of dark pebbles, what might have been coal? And all this as my little cousins expended energy at our feet:


On TUESDAY I woke up early and voted. Off-year, so there were like six propositions and of course Gavin Newsom won for mayor, perhaps because, as someone told me later that day, "He's just so damn good-looking," and the roster of people he was running against read like a variety show line-up. The volunteers were sweet, but seemed a little incompetent, and I wondered how voting could be more powerful than certain conversations.

On WEDNESDAY, this happened, but I didn't hear about it until THURSDAY, and even then I was too busy getting painfully drunk with the best coworkers a girl could ask for. And so I started to process it on FRIDAY. 36,000 gallons of oil fuel (which is somewhere in between gasoline and straight-up crude oil) spilled in San Francisco Bay. Unforgivably slow response and the poison spread quickly and far, closing down more than a dozen beaches, seriously the most amazing gems of our city and surrounds. But then this fine SUNDAY morning I happened to click on this. 1,300 tons of oil fuel spilled in the Black Sea after an oil tanker split in half?!

Still the thing that gets me most is that after a nice walk with a friend in yesterday's grey drizzle, about a half a block from my house I encountered a man I often see hanging out on the streets of my neighborhood. He was standing still right in the middle of the sidewalk, facing east, underneath one of those huge black umbrellas, the kind my dad used to have. And as I slowly walked by him, I realized his head was bowed towards his chest and he was sleeping.

Awake at 4am today

In Beirut today and I woke up at 4am. Brain and body awake. Ready. And when I was sick of lying there I fumbled around our hotel room in the dark and came to sit in the still lobby with the concierge with bloodshot eyes, silent but for the Lebanese diva quietly wailing from the flatscreen tv on the far wall.

Leaving San Francisco, I had meant to wake up at 4am but accidentally managed to stay up all night. And the airport extended the chaos in my head (from all the drinking). There was a ridiculous line at the Delta gate and I, of course, was standing in front of the most annoying woman in the universe, who felt, for some reason that 5:30am was a good time to make business calls and she ended up leaving all of these annoying voice mails. Justine. And then I got yelled at by an attendant and told her not to yell at me and made feel bad and then I got selected for a security search. And probably it was the lack of sleep but I really felt sick to my stomach at being treated that way, all my belongings rooted through as I sat there and my eyes were brimming. But the guy who searched me turned out to be cool--whispered to me "you should have kept it" when I called out to him after he walked away, leaving a lighter he found in my bag on the table.

And Cincinnati was five hours of wandering from one end of the concourse to the other, debating what to eat and where to sit and when to pee. And then I watched CNN. Buttafuco. George W. Bush. Alito. Bombings in Lebanon. Lebanon. War at the refuge camp in the north. My ears perked and it was gone before they really said anything.

In Paris, the warm, bright air made it feel like we were closer to Lebanon--and chaos regarding the buses and the buildings, and Arabic and French drifting around me. People speaking French to me... After we got off the plane, we walked down a blank hall and came to a big room where we first faced a big screen with the letters and numbers that were our connections racing across it. A uniformed man stood in front of the screen, taking requests. There was no order to it, just people walking up to him and declaring their destinations. Some asked it like a question: "Helsinki?" Some said it directly: "Lyons." "Moscow!" "Beirut???" And for each of us, he would point and it was as if we sailed off the ends of his fingertips, to our flights, to those other worlds.

On my way out of the airport in Beirut, I wanted to take a picture of my family, in my mind I saw the bunch of them waiting for me, their expressions changing almost in uniform as they saw me. But instead they were here and there, spread one-by-one across the throng. And my sister ran to me first, grabbing my bag and we all piled into the car.

Beirut felt like a ghost town last night when we walked to our hotel. And this morning I was walking the streets around 6am when it began to wake up.