San Francisco is famous for being one of the worlds most liberal cities and also the gay capital, despite the fact that I met a guy that had no idea of this. I told him he should do a bit of background check before going on vacation next time.
It is the only city that I know of that twice a year arranges a leather and fetisch festival on the streets. Sure, in a sealed off area of course, but still.
Me, Peter and Sabrina went there together with the entire gay and fetisch community that seem to think that the usual Pride-parade is too boring.
Photo: Sabrina Orth
I don’t remember the name of these two, but it was taken in Dolores Park and I like them and thought they would be better put together as their own post…
I’m listening to Bon Iver, trying to finish off the part of the trip that took place in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. I should be sleeping, but there are many things you should do in life. At least that is what we keep telling ourselves.
I was pretty late sending out requests for a couch to sleep on in San Francisco, so most people already hade people staying with them, or were busy. One girl told me she got about five requests every day. So, I had to stay at a hostel.
On wednesday evening I went for the official weekly couchsurfing meeting in town.
Around closing time, I started talking to some people outside the place, and three minutes later I had somewhere to stay for the last four days in the city before heading north.
I ended up with Erik, who lives in the Mission, the neighbourhood that more and more is home to hipsters and well-paid young professionals, a place with lots of restaurants and bars and close to Dolores Park where everyone goes to hang out on a sunny day.
Erik’s roommate had recently moved out, so he had plenty of space for people to stay there. Except for me, Sabrina from Cologne in Germany were also staying there for almost a month. Together with them I got to see more of the local life in the city.
I write because the world I live in is crazy. I write because every single one in this world is just as stuck in it like I am. We are all a product of our environment, our history, and we want to stay there, no one wants to change, no one wants to go with the flow, we all want to stay where we are, not having to take responsibility for our actions, not having to make tough decisions. We all want to sit in our couch, eat chocolate and hope that our problems will go away by themselves. We sacrifice our individuality, turn our responsibility over to our managers, parents, partners and politicians, give us bread and entertainment and we will never raise our voices again.
We sacrifice everything that we are and go out buying the same clothes, listen to the same music, get the same type of tattoos like everyone else. We have the same opinions and thoughts, strive for the same jobs, identical lives and drive the same type of car like everyone else. We do it to express our uniqueness, to show off our personality, despite the fact that we are so afraid that we just gave up that individuality.
Not that my writing make much of a difference, but if I gave up writing, I could no longer handle this world at all. I must allow myself to complain, to point out the absurdities of the lives we live, the way we see ourselves and treat our friends.
I must be allowed to try to understand a world that can not be understood.
What else should I do with my time?
I don’t really know what to say about San Francisco, except that I had a great, yet intense time. Many times when thinking about what to say I realize I can’t.
It is a city of contrast, where every kind of entertainment exists and at the same time so much hard to grasp. You can keep on going here forever. Just like in Stockholm there is an atmosphere of doing, an expectation in the air, a strive never to be bored, to run away from the everyday life.
It is a city of both order and chaos, a city that doesn’t look like anything I thought a modern big city could look like.
I feel instantly at home, partly because of the ease of getting around in the grid like streets, but also because you can find anything here. Whatever you like, wether it be ecclectic music, art, movies, cafés or bars. A sense of variation you seldom see in the big cities in Asia where everything is either traditional or modern, never in between. Here, every step still exist, like wandering through different points in history when you enter a new street, come to a new neighbourhood.
I have thought a great deal about the concept of “good”. Good or bad.
What is good, really? At least I use to ask myself that when I do things. Is this good? Or is it bad? I value things from a point of reference and go from there.
The problem though, is that usually we have inherited that good and bad from people around us, from authority figures. We compare everything we do with someone or something else. Most often what others do is good and what we do is bad.
In those times, it is best not to do anything at all.
If we value something as good, then we automatically get what is bad, and if we value something as bad, we automatically get what is good. We let the jury in Idol decide what a good performance is, critiques to judge what good music or filmmaking is, experts get to decide what good art or photography is. Our managers judge our working abilitites, our friends judge if we are good or bad, and if the clothes we buy suit us or not.
We always rely on someone elses opinions and judgements when we decide. We more than happily help others make their judgements. After all, it would be a total catastrophe if the shoes we were wearing was a size too big, or if we had a shirt with stripes in the wrong direction…
If we stop valuing things as good or bad, we start to tread unknown territory. That can be akward. It is a very deep conditioning, learnt from early childhood, to always compare and value things.
But most values are relative, they differ depending on who you ask. And if they are constantly changing, do we really have to value things at all? Maybe we could instead just do what we do and be ok with that?
What if I could photograph what I want to, and instead of wondering if it is good or bad, I can just say, this is good for me.
It will most likely mean that some people will regard it as good, and some will regard it as bad, and some will be indifferent to it. But that is exactly as it was before too, so it doesn’t really matter. As long as we like what we are doing.
I no longer know if what I write or photograph is good or bad. Most likely it is both and none of it at the same time. It doesn’t matter.
Let’s just do it anyway…
Tonight I sleep with million of stars.
Vi share the same bed, bouncing up and down together on top of the waves of Lake Shasta. The entire Milky Way is with me this summer night.
Suffering is to will something that is not there. Happiness is to will that which happen. Every time.
So simple, really, yet we constantly live in this mental state where we resist everything that happens, refusing to be what we truly are. We try to be someone else, reaching for the goals we think we set up, but have inherited or copied from others. Refusing to accept people for what they are, always trying to change them into what we want them to be.
If we could just see, beyound hesitation, that it actually takes more energy to try to bend the world to our liking, instead of just relaxing and going with the flow.
Then, we could sleep every night with millions of stars. And when we see a shooting star, we smile. For we do not need to make a wish anymore.
I have left the big, intensive city of San Francisco now. Tuesday to be more specific. My friend James from London came to the city on sunday and offered to pick me and Peter (who was also in town) up on the way up north. A timely offer to avoid the hassle of Greyhounding in the middle of the night.
So, tuesday morning we got into the car and started to roll out of the city, immediatelly noticing the difference in climate as you cross the Oakland-bridge and entering the rest of California. The climate in San Francisco is probably unique compared to the rest of the state because of it’s position in the bay.
It took us seven hours through the sunbleached meadows of California up to the forest covered hils of northern California and when we saw the snowy peaks of Mount Shasta, we knew we were getting closer.
We turned on the Kid A album by Radiohead on full volume in the car. Suprisingly not breaking the speakers.
Kid A is an album that it takes a while to get into. It’s perfect for long car drives and walks. Occasions where you can really put your entire attention on the music and let the landscape merge with the progression of the music through the 49 minutes and 57 seconds it takes to complete.
It is an album that demands something of you. If you play it in the background while doing something else it’s going to get to you, several of the tracks on the album would just be annoying. It demands of you to invest a part of yourself in it, and the larger the investment, the greater the gain. It is a composition where all the tracks hold together, forming a greater whole.
The only times I really listen to the album since I discovered it a month ago, is when I know that I can listen to it from start to end without getting disturbed. Often I listen to it with headphones so that I don’t miss all the details and the tiny sounds in the background. For example when three people sit in a car in silence, driving north, with a sound system good enough to encapsulate you.
Now I’m in the middle of nowhere, doing nothing. In a landscape that give you the feeling what it must have been like to come riding in on a horse from the east some time in the 1800’s to start a new life. A new future.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that some of the most revolutionary companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google, millions of start-ups and all the crazy venture capitalists was founded here on the west coast. The adventurers had already moved here.