Well, I'm moved into Mills, even if still not completely set up. (Clothes strewn about the floor from wall-to-wall evidence enough of that). But I'm here.
Some things are exactly as I hopefully expected; and, some things are ... not.
I cannot decide whether the City is freedom or toxic. I do not mean the thick fog that lingers over the city of Oakland, burning off before the fog across the bay and creating a strange, pulling vortex toward that .. City as it sits engulfed in the still-sleeping clouds that weep on passerby's cheeks.
The City is San Francisco and I watch her fall asleep in the morning, waiting to wake hours later to spit crazed bus lines and clacking stilletos and grungy old men with their hair twisted all over their head and a week-old coffee cup shaking in the faces of the rich businessmen on their way to work.
The high-rise buildings are all gray from over here--gray and asleep as the sun leaks white light across their faces.
Oakland is not City: he does not have the heart like the City who sleeps across the bay. All night is loud, aimless sirens and all day is tired people walking from one block to the next: the migrant workers searching for work, the jobless mingling with the homeless so they all look soil and sweat and lethargy.
A city like Oakland cannot decide where he begins and ends: he blurs tokens through Berkeley, into Alameda, down the streets of San Leandro and up into the hills and along the shore of Lake Merritt. He feels non-committal, afraid, insecure.
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I am drinking a cup of coffee brought to me from Africa.
I long for someplace exotic.
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