I wasn't prepared for this

You love your friends and what matters to them matters to you, so of course you say yes when they invite you to come see their newborn baby. Of course. Over to the hospital you go. I am privileged to not be so familiar with these places but I recognize the elevator, the doors that open at the push of a button, the hallways that project medical ability, biological stability, hope’s reliability. Then into the room. Into her room.

And there she is. In her artificial womb of plexiglass and portals, wires and cables to monitors and screens, heartbeat over respiration over oxygen saturation and there is no normal but this one as you listen to the beep of alarm and watch it come back down to green before you breathe again.

Truth be told, promise not to tell? I generally think babies are kinda ugly. Amphibian creatures barely sapiens, born from a woman they promise but I’m tempted to look around for the spaceship retreating.

But this? This tiny person, swimming through the unfamiliar space of her newborn body, premature and perfect, this little girl is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. And I scorn the scorn that whispers at the cliche because bugger me but it’s true.

And I don’t know what to say. She’s magnificent.

I’ve felt this way before, witnessing the small ones of kith and kin. Stood abashed before the splendor of creation. And I well remember the transcendent majesty of looking at my lady love’s son and feeling the gods’ gift of realizing “Yes, yes, for this I would die to protect.” And he wasn’t even mine.

And suddenly, on a normal Saturday night I’m feeling it again, the awe, the sheer dumbfounded reverence for what it is to bring a child into this world. Tomorrow I’ll rage at the idiocy that brings violence to remove them, as everyone is a child in someone’s heart, but for now I exist in little besides awe.

I am accustomed to seeing the Divine in Nature, the pulse of the universe in ocean waves, sand dune shifts, and sunlight through the leaves, but here I am in a concrete cave made by men and everywhere I look I see godliness. In the purpose of the space, the quiet skill and sleepless devotion of the staff, the faceless researchers who devise the tests and cures, and above all else: her, and the indomitability of her will to continue. What is god if not this newest person? Why would it be anywhere else?

Outside it’s a normal night. Cars each going to their own someplace, sports fans ribbing at each others laundry, friends talking too loudly on the lamplit street with words about nothing that manifest their love anyway. And it is a normal night. Another in the endless line of nights where somewhere nearby a miracle is breathing. And the awe overtakes me. I was ready to meet their child, but I was not prepared for this.

I want your life

“I wish I had your life.” I get that a lot. “Must be tough!” they say with a smile. And I can’t disagree. I have it incredibly good. Incomprehensibly good. Sometimes I can feel the weight of the billions of lives lived and living that would give anything for a fraction of the ease, privilege, and pleasure my life has. I don’t know how to give adequate thanks.

I can’t complain.

Today was another good day. Of friends, interest, safety and ease. And rain, musical on the windowpanes, while out in it it’s something harder, gusting to feel like stabs, only softening to water to run down inside your clothes.

A friend and I walked around San Francisco tonight, from Market Street up to Grace Cathedral, down for a meandering burble about Chinatown before finding ourselves in Long Beach and going with it, until we stood on Coit Tower’s promontory with the storm blown in off the Pacific. Back through the Financial District to drip on Bart trains, he went south, I came east.

Then a bike ride through streets like faucets open to any nook of me that was merely soggy not soaked, changing that.

For a moment, the unadulterated wind behind me, I was sailing with the vapor snakes that gave form to every vagary of wind. Grey writhing things that slid on the wet black pavement and made me feel like an windborn seaborn waterborne god.

The road curved out of that harmony, wind rocking my frame and tugging my handlebars, sticks invisible in the undertree rubble kicking my wheel out at sudden angles, tire lost in a mush of sodden leaves that my mind registered would make braking impossible under the bobbing red stoplights.

But I made it home, equally soaked and in love with the world. Moved a snail off my doorstep. And felt something unexpected and familiar.

Because I have it good. Really good. I love my life, my freedom, the fact that today I bought two plane tickets touching three continents. I don’t want to give this up. But standing in the stoop under a single yellow bulb

I realized that if I’d done things differently. Lived a little bit otherhow. There would be someone here when I got home. Someone to laugh at my soaked state, help me inside, take care of my clothes and set an old towel under my bicycle while I climb in the shower.

Instead I’ll do it for myself. And it’s fine. Really is. But here in these quiet moments after midnight, when it feels like everyone else is in bed with their paired each-others, I find myself looking over and “I wish I had your life.”

Folsom Street Fair; or, leashes, lashes, and laughter in San Francisco

It was a perfect Sunday afternoon, all things considered. Soft, warm air that eased around, but that fell far short of windy; and no rain, but solid overcast. Those clouds in particular were crucial, since nobody likes sunburned cheeks or roasted wieners. No, not hot dogs and not faces either, I’m talking about the posteriors being presented and penile plethora on parade on the streets of San Francisco yesterday.

Folsom Street Fair began in 1984 as “Megahood”, at a pivotal moment for the SoMa (South of Market St) neighborhood, which had long been a working-class/industrial/warehouse area, with a large population of sailors from the nearby port and a “skid row” reputation. But it had something else too: a strong identity as a hub of SF’s gay population.

Folsom Street was the heart of the community, and by the 1970s over 30 gay and leather clubs had earned the area the nickname “The Miracle Mile”. Authorities and their “vice squads” periodically raided and closed the bars, but the community held its own against redevelopment initiatives for decades, until the AIDS crisis decimated the population, leaving them vulnerable to the “revitalization” drives of city planners.

Dying, harassed, and terrified of a disease killing with a savagery they had never seen, the community was weakened, but far from defeated. Authorities picked up the pace of bathhouse closures and bar regulation in 1984, and that same year, Megahood/Folsom Street Fair began, declaring to the world, and city planners, that the gay population was still alive and strong.

Today the festival is the third largest single-day spectator event in California, after the Rose Parade presented by Honda, and San Francisco Pride Parade (presented by people with hearts and souls, just like Folsom), with 400,000 people filling 13 city blocks, and generates over $250,000 for local charities working in public health, human services, and the arts.

God I love this city.

Inexplicably, despite having grown up in the Bay Area, I had never been to “Folsom”, and jumped at the chance to go yesterday. Accompanied by my lady and two of her friends, I meandered through the press of leather harnesses, bare booties, and smiles. Leashes, lashes, and laughter. Corsets, ball gags, and unabashed joy. The fair celebrates not just gay and leather culture, but fetishism in general, and expands to be the sort of pan-inclusive acceptance that makes me so proud of my city.

Guiltily aware that it’s the privilege bestowed on me by the random circumstances of my birth, I always enjoy being in the minority, on Zambian trains or Kurdish streets, and now here, surrounded by a press of people so expressively interested in different things than I am; I felt comfort and an upwelling of joy. How beautiful that groups so long stigmatized and discriminated against are able to come together in the sun and dance in the street.

That joy is a great feeling, but was I missing an opportunity? I hunkered down to imagine a world where this was the everyday, a world dedicated and dominated by a sexuality I did not share...would it bother me?

The thought experiment failed, and I can tell you why. Simply being in the minority is not the point, not when the majority is so welcoming and supportive. There was no one shouting hateful “hetero!” in my face, nor denying me any sort of opportunity or possibility based on my natural inclinations. Here, people can just be as they are, the way god/nature/the matrix made them, without shame or condemnation for selves or others. Being in the minority here was less oppressive than being in the minority of people who wish book stores were open until midnight, and I wanted to hug every single person on that street.

Folsom Street Fair isn’t for everyone, and the consensus seems to be that if you’ve seen it once, you’ve seen it enough, but I for one cannot wait for next year, to walk among that air of beautiful humanity, love and San Francisco at its finest.

My San Francisco Giants

I couldn’t remember the last time I went to a Giants game, but we definitely had a different president. That ain’t good, for a kid raised on Will Clark, Robbie Thompson, and (my personal favorite, the player whose cards I collected as a grubby-fingered youngling) Brett Butler.

So, back in the Bay Area after a few years among the baseball-deprived, the footie-fanatics, the soccer-seeking-savages, who think ERA is a brand name and OBP a medical disorder, going to a game was on deck. When I heard two of my dearest San Franciscans were going to marry each other, I looked at that beautiful union and thought “There’s an excuse to go to a Giants game.”

The park of my childhood was Candlestick, dug into the edge of San Francisco’s worst neighborhood, a fortress of cement so ominous it looked more like a Soviet mining camp than a stadium. We always peered down at the field from the nosebleed seats, even before I quite understood what that joke meant, but nachos never tasted as good as they did with those fog-chilled fingertips, and a paper cup of sickly sweet hot chocolate was too good for the gods.

Now we sat in a much nicer ballpark, where the fries come soaked in garlic, and beer has moved from an odor to a flavor. So close to the action, I could see the extent of the season’s beards, as well as the ubiquitous advertising, and paused a nostalgic moment to remember the days before branding conquered professional sports, and when prices were less punitive. Then the national anthem finished and my San Francisco Giants took the field.

The uniforms and the energy were the same, and musical queues still provoked their clap-response without my conscious action. The four note “up-down-up-down/Let’s Go Giants” plays and my hands smack out clap, clap, clapclapclap of their own volition. Pavlov’s palms.

A baseball game is the perfect place to hang out. It’s dull enough to allow time and space to sit back and focus on the company of friends, but irascible enough that at any moment you might have to jump up and scream yourself hoarse as that long fly ball decides whether or not to stay fair, or your leadoff hitter digs for two.

And in a world that seems increasingly contrived, political campaigns and international debacles seemingly orchestrated months in advance, baseball remains reliably unpredictable, where the worst team sweeps the best and the rookie strikes out the All Star. And in this Twitter-headed age that requires constant tension, you never know if you’re going to sit through a 0-1 sleeper, or a 9-10 festival of offense. The drama is so much more poignant when it’s real, unpredictable, out of anyone’s control. And this year’s last couple weeks to play have drama to spare, as both my Bay Area teams juggle the Wild Card.

Our game was...beautiful. The first third was a pitching battle, with moments of teasing promise, then clenching danger, and sighs of release when both came to naught. Bottom of the fourth and good solid baseball put the Giants up by 1. High fives until your hands tingle, and the throat needs a drink to cool it down again.

But top of the fifth, they tied it up with a solo shot to right; at least they earned it. More tension, pitches slapping into the catcher’s glove and cracks of the bat that open the eyes, but the side is retired. The seventh inning stretch must have relaxed the dugout too, because the bottom of the inning put us on top by one, again… But top of the ninth, they tied it up.

So. Here we were, in the sort of scenario imagined on playgrounds and vacant lots throughout the ages. Bottom of the ninth. Tie game. Two outs, one on, our star kid (I’m old now, I can call a 27-year old a ‘kid’, especially when he’s as fresh-faced as Buster Posey) walks up to the plate. He settles in. The sold out crowd stands. Fouls and balls, close calls and tricky takes, and it’s a full count. One more strike and we go to extra innings…

But instead it’s a high fly ball, going, going...veering towards the line...hard to tell from where we are...is it going to stay fair? The noise is already crashing when it lands in the seats, and the wave breaks. Beer is undoubtedly flying, somewhere, and no one cares. He rounds the bases while the bass vibrates our seats, and 41,503 people have both arms in the air, and a city is shouting.

We file out in the jubilant crowd, and I walk to the BART station in a steady flow of Giants jerseys, drifts of pot smoke, and the glitter and dance of the Bay Bridge’s nightly light show. Friends, my hometown, and a win for my team: it’s a mighty fine summer night in San Francisco.

"The Bay Lights" nightly show