friday

leave work early, a few tendrils hanging in the breeze, but who gives a fuck, because I certainly don't. Home to my home for a last minute straightening and hiding of things, before my old friends arrive in their various states of motherhood for a night out in the city. I can hide the BOBs but I can't hide the fact that I have only condiments and booze in my pantry.

Out we go, out we go in underdress and overdress, belly and breast. Linking arm in arm we cross paths with a foursome wearing our very same costume when we were fifteen, and as H remarked in her wisdom, of course they are that much cooler than we, as their is less big. Ah, the eighties.

To dinner, we comment on incomes disposible and barely.... Deep in the mission - exotic names, this foreign cinema, that rooftop deck at medjool, that drunken fool.
We sit in my living room and play songs and marvel at thirty years of friendship and fall asleep sprawled in all corners of my very small city existence.

saturday

nine o'clock rolls around and we all stir, and the sun is shining through the slats in the blinds and I can tell without looking that it is simply just going to be a magical day. Two of us run and two of us walk, four of us go through the bulk of my linen and set out in the sunshine.

In a cab to the china town gate, in the name of beguiling trinkets for very small fingers and a trip to another land. Up Grant, into the shops, dazzled by volume and the unabashed frippery. I always forget just how beautiful it is, just how falling down it is, just how alien. We had lunch at the R&G lounge and couldn't persuade the ladies into salt and pepper crab, drank far too much tea.

And in the space of a few blocks you thread a continent, jump to Green, jump to the fancy cakes and the fancy bras and the opera singers in coffee shops, through the park and down past Bimbo's to the cannery, pause for a margarita, the day is already long and we have already travelled many miles through our childhoods and our mothers. And then BOOM! The Blue Angels have ignited the sky and there is jet fuel and vapors and astonishing, deafening noise, duck for cover noise, war noise.

And yet the mastery of these planes is mesmerizing, these war machines are things of ferocious beauty in tandem, and the liberalist of the liberal stand agape. Who couldn't love the precision design geeks and nascar dads alike. But what a peculiar dichotomy, the war machines over my beloved bridge and their terrible noise the prevalence of flags and facial hair. Walking through the crowd I became distinctly aware that I am nothing more than a pair of lovely tits on legs. For ever lovin' christ they were booming Neil Diamond's "they come to america" in all earnestness, I felt like I was in another dimension, the one where we all suckle freely on the big war machine and sign up for death transfixed by the sheer glory of a barrel roll beneath the golden gate bridge.

Later there was traffic, lord was there traffic.

And later I was sun scorched and chilled to the bone when I met P an M under the harvest moon for the hardly strictly bluegrass party, a wholly different crowd. A wholly different politic. This is where I become invisible. Blond girl at the bar, sipping tequila and soda, facing out and totally still and completely invisible. But hey, turns out I like cheese grits. tequila, tequila and some more and still stillness, becalmed, connected, but still, still and invisible. Conversations course over me and fragments tumble by, musicians swap the violin for the mandolin, but in my stillness I am missing the engineer I am missing the conversation that we are not having.

We gave a ride to an itinerant musician, deep into the park past midnight, I was jacked on cinammon gum and would have gladly driven him to the ends of the earth if only to start running.

sunday

I wake up missing something.

Out into indian summer and down to the cafe for a bit of dark liquid sustenance, shoulders in tank tops and jeans cuffed above the ankles and the promise of absolute lassitude and the tinge of bitterness that goes with a perfect day for recently brokenhearted. A cross town bus to his neighborhood to have my hair color righted, battling twin desires to see and be seen and to hide and cower, how utterly perfect that I should have to catch the bus on his corner, how do I explain that and why should I. Here I am, then. Standing on the corner, cowering for the bus, the bus I have forgetten to ride, styled within an inch of my life, the hair I wont be able to duplicate, the new color as strident as a banner heralding autumn, good lipstick, deposited in the middle of nowhere on 25th avenue, to my right I have the pull of baker beach and to my left the park and the hundred thousand souls come for a little bluegrass. I set my course towards the park, when what I wanted was the beach, not that he would be there.

Standing, no crouching in the grove, the cowards, elvis costello and t bone burnett, forty thousand middle fingers lift towards the sky every time a blue angel drags through the sky above. I feel accidentally protective.

The sun shines and the fog hangs back, and the sun shines and shines, my shoulders start to burn and my cheeks redden, but my fat curls hold, and my new blond expands as the sun starts to descend. I am still invisible, but I have decided that secretly I am going to become a creature of colossal beauty, I will be terrible and fair, even if I am unseen. But just before that I will be sprawled on a tiny yellow blanket with my two dearest friends and Emmylou will be singing as the sun is setting, just before the pacific chill sets in, when those many thousands of heads are connected to all those many thousands of shoulders, dancing and laughing, listening or not paying attention to this sea of life, to this sea of love, fraught with nostalgia or cementing futures, hungry for bed or hungry for life, peaceful in the crowd or searching for the next battle with the nearest convenient stranger, over this weekend I saw it all. All the dichotomies along with all of the lovers. It was the lovers that socked me hard in the gut.

Up through the belly of the park in the dark with the bats and the bikes, dragging my ankle like sisphysis up that hill to the nearest bar.

And then, and then because the universe is an extraordinarily fickle bitch, and because that is just that is the way it goes, I will open my email and there will be a tiny gem from the hairdresser, the genesis of this blog, he wants to know where I am, he wants to know how I am, he is four years too late, I just tipped my head and roared.