I want for someone to clearly explain to me what it is about the bay area that makes living here so hard. the obvious factors (the expense, the crowds, the clamoring drive & go) are plain, but there is something else too. something else unsettling, some edge that leaves me unconvinced. a quality of effacement. the way it seems unusually hard to find community or make friends. the way one feels continually without a place. I have been here for four years almost, and sometimes I feel like so little has changed from the way I felt here the first month. this sense of inaccess, inhospitability, not knowing where to find people who thought the way that I did. I feel like I have clues now, but no clear picture. (one definitive change, however, since I arrived: I have a keen and steady sense of direction around here now. remembering that first week, as I attempted to navigate from fruitvale to west oakland via wending surface streets, ooh: it reduced me to tears each time.)

and on the subject of expense & economy, I want to note the galling need to live with roommates:

who, at this moment, are fully engulfed in a mushroom-trip in the adjacent room. I can half hear their laborious pontificating, their coos and yeeaaahs of heartfelt agreement. I want to tell them: we are in our late twenties. it is sunday night. what what what are you doing.

I miss, I do, living alone. in my creaking-floored studio with the pirated cable and the drawers full of measuring cups that were only mine.

.

I'm reading "the verificationist" by donald antrim right now, and loving it. listening to woven hand. drinking (solo, don't judge me) a bottle of syrah, wishing it weren't sunday.