SORRY NO PASSENGERS

I’ve been meaning to finish my posts about my summer vacation; meaning to do it for long enough that it’s becoming just another thing to stress about. I hope I’ll get to it because thinking about those trips does still make me happy. Like it’s been a rough year inside my head, but I’ve tried. I did some fun things.

It’s really hot so I stayed in most of the day feeling mushy and swollen. I went out to get food and groceries for a little bit. I felt crabby; the Grocery Outlet greeter was really going all-out, to the point that the people he greeted did a double take. I quietly seethed, knowing it was mostly the heat and the stress of the whole thing—starting grad school, still just feeling like my dumb self and not someone who can do grad school.

I always like the last few blocks after I pass over from the Mission to Potrero; highway plus trees plus chain link fence plus trash. I never walk on the clean quiet side of the street, even though this side can be messy sometimes. Taking in all the details of the squished sidewalk next to the highway always makes me calm down.

Saw an old friend last week; she told me lots of stuff, but what stuck in my head is a guy helped her break into a port-a-potty at night in a park, because none of the local restaurants would let her use their bathroom. So that’s positive.

Started thinking about another friend, who I’ve talked to lately—just remembering so clearly a visit I made to him 12 years ago, late summer like now, both of us in our early twenties and sweltering. Through a series of unlucky decisions he ended up living alone in a house with no furniture and basically no access to public transit. I was just visiting for a few days but I still remember his routine he showed me. Walk like a mile or two, wait next to some underbrush for a bus, take it for a minute, walk and walk and then take a student shuttle, pretending to be a student who lost your ID (just pretend to be looking in your pockets and finding nothing and begging for forgiveness).

Just thinking about the shitty things you can get stuck doing and how that’s your routine. And how my friend is doing better now and lives in a really nice place. And I do too actually.

As I was planning my trip I started to come around, thinking my propensity for trains and Greyhounds was silly because planes are so much faster. How bad can planes be? How good can buses and trains be? Unfortunately I’ve convinced myself of my own preference even more strongly, by taking all three in succession.

Not sure how much to write about my personal life and inner feelings here. I like making blogs about exploring. Exploring is often something I do that’s separate from my personal life and even serves as a distraction from difficult times. But this time, I do want to include occasional personal stuff.

Tl;dr I’m feeling absolutely doomed and tortured but it’s maybe because of jetlag/not sleeping last night. I’m overly sensitive to that.

The last few days I stayed with friends in Boston and I adapted to the time difference very quickly in terms of sleeping and waking, but physically I felt like garbage. My friends have a toddler who I was meeting for the first time and I was kind of bowled over by what great parents they are, and also she’s just fantastic. Yet I was waking up with my blood running cold and going into dark moods whenever I had a moment alone, so the visit was a mishmash of emotions.

Took the Amtrak Lake Shore Limited from Boston to Toledo. 10/10 never any complaints about Amtrak. For some reason when I was planning my trip, I never realized that I could transfer from Amtrak to Greyhound at Toledo instead of Chicago, so not only did I overpay for both my bus and train tickets, but I had to buy an all new bus ticket after going back and forth with the Amtrak lady on the phone at 6 AM. No, my 7PM ride from Toledo to Cincinnati could not be exchanged for the same trip at 8AM because it was only possible to buy the 8AM ticket online, but it was only possible to exchange tickets over the phone. I don’t get why Greyhound is so strict when they’re not even popular.

I had some short enjoyable walks when we stopped in Albany and when I was waiting for my Greyhound in Toledo. Pictures to come after I sleep.

I almost missed the Greyhound because I was the only passenger and I thought the bus hadn’t come, because no one was lining up for it. Turns out the driver was waiting outside for me, so I felt bad, but I got distracted by the Greyhound being pretty nice inside. Obviously, I have complaints about Greyhound the company, but I don’t get why people are down on the buses themselves.

Time to cheer up by listening to podcasts and playing Pokémon Blue on a 20-year-old GameBoy. Playing this game is something I get back into every few years. I have no interest in Pokémon Go or any other Pokémon games but there’s just something about Pokémon Blue. It’s so small and simple and repetitive, but there’s just enough to keep you emotionally invested because the small simple repetitive things are animals.

The wise old man characters are always saying they can tell how much I love my Pokémon, that I don’t just care about winning. Like how would they know that?

If you drive, you might not know what you’re looking at. But for me, looking at this tangle of freeways and overpasses is like looking at a black hole. How do I walk through here? When I was younger, there was a time when I was more comfortable walking along highways, but now it really freaks me out, and maybe it always should have.

I often have reason to go to this stretch of Bayshore Blvd; the recycling center is here, there’s an antique store and an antique diner/bar, and it’s the first leg of a trip to my favorite coffee shop in Bernal Heights. Plus, sometimes I just forget to get off the 9. But once I’m here, I find myself stuck in a way I rarely am. Distance-wise, I know it’s not far from the SF General area, where I live. When I take the 9 it’s less than a five-minute trip. Usually, if I am stranded without a bus I just start walking, but when I’m stuck on Bayshore I’m truly stuck.

In the past couple months I had a “mental health crisis.” I spent a lot of time googling those words and agonizing over if it was okay to say I was having one. In the state I was in, I was especially scared to explore the Bayshore/101 black hole even though I felt like there might be some possible way to walk between the two locations. I just visualized myself stepping into traffic and thought I’d better not find out if it was a fear or a wish.

I’ve been feeling increasingly better, so I went for it on Monday when I got stuck on the SF General side waiting for the bus to take me to Bayshore. I slowly walked south and just as I remembered, what looked like sidewalks on the roads leading into the tangle all melted away until there was only road. But by carefully taking turns, I ended up still on tiny sidewalks until I passed what seemed to be the start of a foot or bicycle path under the overpass. It went off to one side, so I continued straight for a while, but once again the sidewalk was becoming narrower. I was walking against traffic and I found myself irrationally clinging to the tunnel wall, as I felt like I was walking directly into the cars. The only thing that kept me going was the prospect of turning around, walking back to the footpath, and being seen again by the trio of homeless guys who were sitting and talking near the beginning of the path. I suppose getting around on foot just is difficult sometimes, but I still felt embarrassed by the idea of these guys watching me be so confused about going under a bridge.

Finally, a clear image popped into my head of one of the oncoming cars swerving a little and just squishing me off the side of the tunnel. I turned around and hurried back to the guys, tried to pass by them like nothing embarrassing happened. The little walking path under the bridge was clean and private. I emerged in Bayshore. But I’ll probably still be stuck when it’s late at night, because the little path will be too secluded and dark even for me.

The other day I bought a handmade ring from a guy at the ferry building. His rings were only five dollars—strands of aluminum twisted into neat patterns around one or two spiny glass beads. He started making them in 2020 when he was living in Brazil during early covid. He said Brazil was a great place to be at that time. The man was gregarious and kept going on about this; I was confused until I realized he thought covid wasn’t that bad. “People in Brazil would just go to the store and get ivermectin, without even going to a doctor,” he said approvingly. SF is such a bubble, I thought he was being satirical for a minute even though I know lots of people believe that stuff.

On Monday night I tried out Supreme Pizza. I like it as a location, and I like the pizza, even though it’s mainly crust. Their window is a nice one to sit in, piling all my odds and ends on the table. One slice of their pizza turned out to be as big as two slices of normal pizza, which was a nice surprise. That dinner (reading yet another Sally Rooney book) and that walk home had me in a pretty good mood.

I’m currently on the plane to visit my friends and their baby in Boston. But she’s not really a baby; I missed everything because of covid. She stands on end, talks, etc. I hope she likes me.

This is my first time out of the Bay Area since the US started locking down. I expect it to be weird. This whole time I’ve been hearing (online, or in national media) about how unsafe everyone in the US is being. But SF remained very strict until recently and didn’t resemble what was being described. Especially for the first year, when they’d lock up our playgrounds and parks, and people seemed to hate each other for potentially having covid, I was boiling with resentment at somebody. We kept doing this, we were told, because of all the cases the rest of the US had. But the rest of the US wasn’t doing it back.

Most of my trip will be in the Cincinnati area, on the border between Ohio and Kentucky. Is everyone going to not be wearing masks there? It’s just weird to think about. Some people don’t wear them in SF now, but it’s still very common.

One thing is certain: I hate flying. I forgot how bad it is to have to apologize to other people for having to pee.

I like Sally Rooney because I’m basic, but I recently read an essay about queerness in her books—rather, the way her books allude to characters being queer, but the relationships are all male/female and pretty traditional, so the queerness feels like a pose. I enjoyed the essay while also feeling like it stomped on my foot, the exact place my foot is hurting:

Imagine a book where, after Alice, despondent, tells Felix that Eileen cares about her but “it’s not the same”—after Eileen sobs to Simon that “she doesn’t love me … with Alice I’ve ruined everything”—after they appear to each other, atop and at the foot of the stairs, “each like a dim mirror of the other”—imagine a book where, after Eileen says, “I just want everything to be like it was … and for us to be young again and live near each other, and nothing to be different,” they do not go off to move in with a boyfriend and write another novel, or get pregnant and marry their childhood love. Where this moving-in-with, this refusal to turn off or aside from the expected road, does not constitute growing up.

I liked the book fine, but when I got to the end I did feel slapped. There’s this thing where life seems to be organized around a very specific version of romance and family, yet if you’re upset at not getting those things (or not being suited for those things) people treat you like you have a bad attitude.

For years, I believed I’d overcome all my college angst about not being “normal” and not having a “normal” future. I believed it really had been a bad attitude, that I just had to be whatever I wanted and enjoy it. But suddenly, the inevitability of the correct, bio, nuclear, mono family looms. I’m carrying it around like a rat king. I feel bad about it in so many tied up ways that I can’t even look at or think about one piece at once. It just starts pulling on everything and every piece starts hurting, even the ones I thought I had put aside.

I start this blog at the beginning of some cross-country travels and adventures, which I’m hoping will cheer me up, or at least help me remember some previous version of myself that thought about anything other than how old and childless I am.

One good thing is whenever I walk anywhere, I always walk along this block full of weird plants, highway, chain-link fences, broken glass:

I got up my courage to try a new restaurant, a sushi place at 24th and Florida, Sake Bomb. From the outside it always looked so busy and fancy that I was afraid to go in. But it was pleasant on the inside, and I even felt cool reading by myself while I ate off those stone slab plates. Salmon skin roll, avocado and cucumber roll, big old Sapporo in a handled glass. The waiter was super attentive and would run over to the table just to arrange the beer bottle and water pitcher more symmetrically behind my plates of food.

Seated next to me was an articulate girl explaining her food allergies to the waiter with the help of a little card, and then explaining everything else about herself to her companions for the rest of the meal. I kept sneaking glances at her and being shocked she was very young, maybe only nineteen.

I liked walking home, a little buzzed, everything standing out surreally:

Maybe if I live through the hump of my 30s and get to a point where I’m inarguably middle-aged, I can get over the whole crisis about aging. Maybe I just can’t handle both at once.

Groggy-looking small almost supernaturally odd-looking man wearing an open Hawaiian shirt and slowly drinking a canned soda at Happy Donuts at 10 AM. Some people age and just look like an old version of their younger self, but others, like this man, get a cartoony exaggerated look. Their face, their shoulders, their eyes—everything pops out.

Since I normally don’t go out in the morning, it feels like a whole secret world.

I think I used to see the same man sitting around in coffee shops when I lived in Glen Park. I’m trying to keep him in mind as a role model. The other day I had a headache, tried to nap, woke up in a jolt of panic—I’m so old. Looked at myself in the selfie camera obsessively, holding my face frozen so I wouldn’t see the lines.

It’s stupid but a bunch of stuff just happened to me at once, and I feel like I missed everything. I’m no longer pretty enough to get anything with my looks (just ignore the fact that I’ve thought I looked like a frog my whole life, and it’s only when looking at old pictures of myself that I’m like, “wow I guess I was actually pretty and getting by on my looks back then”).

I’m 33 and a half, so older than Jesus. More relevantly, I’m older than Stockard Channing in Grease—probably the go-to example of a woman pretending to be a teenager when she’s not.

I think if I could jump ahead to my 60s I would probably feel normal again. I could definitely be a certain kind of senior-cusp person. But my hobbies—wandering around the city, riding buses, flea markets, eating at deserted cash-only diners—just feel wrong on a 33-year-old. When I was 23 it made sense that I am always alone and sort of confused but curious, standing around listening to conversations and impulsively swerving off my route to investigate alleys and garden paths. I was exploring. I had my whole life ahead of me. Now it feels like I should probably be doing something else.

Growing up, when I started beating up on myself I would meditate on my hero Edward Gorey. Ace by modern standards, beautiful shingled house, crabby. When he lived in New York, went religiously to the ballet every week; when he moved to Cape Cod, went religiously to the same deli every day for lunch. I can relate to that. But he’s someone who is universally regarded as impressive and weird, not sad and weird. It’s like through the sheer force of his style, people don’t have any of the reactions you’re supposed to have when talking about someone who spent most of their time alone.

His house is a museum full of stuff that is only cool to keep if you’re famous—deli receipts, his raccoon fur coat that he kept to make a point after he realized it’s unethical to have a raccoon fur coat. My parents and I went a few years ago. There’s this photo of him holding a friend’s baby and just kind of gaping at it in disapproval. Couldn’t be me.