Notes · · San Francisco

Now Five Years Later On-Or-Time After Time

It's raining again. After I arrived in San Francicso, it rained for like forty days before I was here for even four weeks. I want to say it doesn't get me down, but it does.

Yesterday was sunny though and I went for a long run in Golden Gate Park with a thumpalicious soudtrack of Eurodance versions of Eighties music—thank you, Devio. I was lost for about half of the jog and that's a beautiful thing since running in circles as I was, I ended up seeing more of the park in thirty minutes than I did in the thirteen years I lived here before.

Of course, it's always a joy revisiting the rose garden, the soccer field, the Green Tea Garden, Stow Lake, and of course, the Queen Wilhelmina Hose Garden out by the windmills. Who knew oversexed men like windmills so much?

I finished up at Ocean Beach. It was magic. Imagine my silhouette against the horizon with my arms raised triumphantly to the sky. It was sort of like that. Sort of like being a cancer survivor in a made-for-TV movie. But without the cancer or washed up celebrities.

Well, that's only part true. When the endorphins kicked in I did imagine a scenario involving Don Alonso Quixote and Sancho Panza. You see they have retired to a tiny village in the hills outside of Fresno that nobody knows about. It's a shame, really, that the locale is so obscure because it just so happens there is more Brutalist architecture per acre there than anywhere else on the planet. It's true! One afternoon, Lindsay Wagner and Erik Estrada are skydiving. A freak wind carries them off course and they land in the village. Eventually, they make their way to the travel agency Alonso and Sancho are operating from one of the shop fronts on the mezzanine level of the Tiny Village stock exchange. Lindsay and Erik are desperate to buy tickets back to their intended target of Burbank where they are to be the judges on a new reality game show teaming college wrestlers and cheerleading squads with couples experiencing fertility difficulties. Sadly, Quixote and Panza don't actually do any travel planning from the agency. They are strangers to this modern age and have bought blenders instead of computers. They make the actors protein shakes and send them on their way.

A long run on a sunny day is like MDMA no one can take away.