For YEARS… I was joshed because of my experience of the ‘resonance’ of San Francisco. It being consciously avoided like the plague.
I said it plainly then. It’s not a living city.
Even based in the Headlands, the only time I’d willingly go into SF was to go practice Mandarin in Chinatown or go for supplies in Japan town. I can count on two hands the number of times I willingly went in from July 2018 through December 2019.
It’s literally a city of the dead, and not in a sayulita mountainside cemetery ambling down to a beautiful beach city of the dead.”
It vibrated like an unkempt graveyard to my spirit, a habitually desecrated one, the buildings proudly marching down dead avenues like bleached bones, glimmering in the overcast light like dirty tombstones.
Across the decades every person who claimed SF as their favorite city in passing told me Everything that was needed to be known, too.
There has not been One person who defeated that rubric.
It was like “thaat tracks like a motherfuck. Go with… whatever you’re called to go~ with🙄” and then I’d just cough up random Latin protectively.
Born there? Different…possibly that immunity is akin to born & bred New Yorkers. But by apathetic choice?
It always lined up.
Although I’ve called it the walking dead zone since visiting a college roomie on the far side of debuting my line who chose to live in the tenderloin because it gave her gravitas … when based out in the Headlands I came to treat the spirit of the city sullenly accepting me in its outer limits as the equivalent of being sent to stay with the aunt who was stuck in an abusive marriage while your parents tried to have an amicable divorce 3000 miles away, the first ever in your family. Her kids were abusive, empty insolent leering fucks like their dad & she hated your mom but was fine with you because she knew the dick you’d rebelled against yer mom being.
I was responsibly respectful. Respect the dead.
But as a scifi author feeling the galloping hooves of the coming( I’d thought zombie) apocalypse as 2020 came upon the horizon I did everything I could to get the fuck out of dodge before that year turned.
I Loved book of Eli & was safely based out in its zion-xanadu… but there was no fucking way my end times were gonna be hashed out there.
“When the dead reanimate, they’re gonna be busting outta manholes in this fucking place. Fuck no.”
Needless to say, I have worked through ALOT of SF existential angst, primarily because I’m only here because the Chinese in my family were wise enough to flee it into the delta, connecting the railways. The town did my great-uncles wrong in the 19th century & re-upped with my Chinese, Irish & Black grandmother who’d had to be based there with 3 little kids while my mom’s dad was in the Pacific theater during world War two. A lot had to be…ancestrally integrated whilst on that terroir.
I FELT IT ALL. was rocked by it.. the pallor of death. I was gritting my teeth coming & going …and it was like 70+ years of post traumatic stress. The white folks on the base were assholes, Chinatown folks were assholes because she was mixed, & black folks othering those who aren’t a monolith were also the norm. For her. That virgoan duck footed woman had gone through enough to justify that ability to snap a neck there alone.
That’s…why the trek to Ansel Adams & Kehinde Wiley WAS sacred.
But Angel Island vibrationally echoed all my spirit was yollering about being up there in greater San Francisco the entire 18 months. In fact, ANGEL ISLAND officially justified it. What I’d felt. The research for Grievechronic was worth it.
& I took the hits, btw lol.
All the “it’s not that bad!You’re being melodramatic.”
“It’s NOT a Fucking Pet Sematery, but for humans! It’s a world Class destination, You fucking New Yorker!”
“Stop weaving you needing a young priest & an old priest into every conversation I make you have with me!”
“What do you mean, you aren’t sitting on the grass?! You can’t opt out the picnic! She can’t, can she?!”
(…the fuck I couldn’t! )
“There’s no ancient burial grounds- there are not dead, unhinged spectres from thousands of unmarked Graves at every turn! We have cemeteries! “
See…
Learn to embrace the luxury…of being able to trust yourself.
Because people will have you fuct up,listening to them.
The proof:
This isn’t about being scared of cemeteries.
Grievechronic literally begins in hell on earth.
It’s the apathy the city reeks of today obviously seeping out from its literally body filled foundation.
It is the most paranormally obvious dead zone I’ve ever suffered through.
It’s in the same category of never eating peaches from certain counties in Alabama. The same consumption, colonizing elan. Energetically speaking.
Every single spot that made me go Fuck this is listed up there⬆️.
It’s that it has always brazenly been rooted in its Malice against anything even remotely melanated from its inception .
All that’s happening there now makes sad, allegorical sense.
To me, anyway.
& it really is creepily one of those things where, if you don’t “see” it…ya might be unconsciously or unconditionally of it.
…but I told you.
Now… that I have been proven correct (please check out Shoshi Parks phenomenally researched article used as visual fodder here)….
Maybe the fucking healing can begin.