willenial

Hello wine review! It’s been a while. Well, I’m married now, which means I bake pies and sew curtains instead of watching competitive elimination reality-television shows. Well Jake is a nice guy so he lets me do both. Just not with him in the room. Last night I made a beef stew with a big chunk of meat he brought home and some stuff that was in the fridge anyway, which is satisfying. It was OK. So while it was cooking, I went to the city, because oh yeah, I don’t live there anymore.

And let me tell you a little bit how that makes me EXTREMELY sad. Like, I am reminded of it in a blog post about something cool or a friend who still lives there taking a picture and my guts feel all twisted and my brain gets a rush feeling of rage at myself for leaving and then shame at caring that much when I didn’t leave the house that often anyway. But I feel like some things I really started to get to know since I’ve left (Mission Street Food, 24th Street, those hidden stairways that have street signs even though they’re just stairways, god, what a magickal place SF can be, like, why does that exist? And I know there’s a perfectly good reason either in whimsy, like deciding to just have a place for people to sit around and hang out instead of that intersection in the Castro for a few months, or practicality that’s not immediately obvious, like certain parts of the bus system).

I just find myself really loving things I hated and standing at the bus stop, seeing how crowded the city is, how everything is everywhere, and walking is easy, and how familiar it all is, and therefore how safe I feel just going for a walk, and how I want to take a picture or say to a friend, AWESOME! about everything, the DISCOLANDIA sign out front of the closed record store, the fact that I could not predict any of those ice cream flavors, the Phil Collins on the radio in the cheeseburger place filled with hipsters eating alone, I love everything and I don’t know if it’s because it is San Francisco or because I just love it, and everything I love is there, or most things. Maybe spending a week in Ohio put that in sharper focus. I mean in Ohio I felt even less like, “ah, I’m home,” although spending time with friends, ones I haven’t seen in a long time, and ones I never talk to except in person, made me feel this little heart-squeezing horrible hurting pain like my hu-man emotions are all, “THIS IS WHERE YOU BELONG” and it applies to everywhere but where I am.

So yeah, when I waited at the bus stop for 14 minutes even though Next Bus said it would be 8 minutes, and I saw the bus stop ad was for chili-lime Cheetos, I was like, Jesus, everything here is different and multicultural and weird, even the processed snack hell foods. And while I was standing there, waiting for the 9, the nastiest nonlate-night bus I’ve ever ridden, I see a white rape-van pull up to the self-serve car wash next door and a bunch of girls in bikinis pile out, like a clown car covered in playa dust, and they sprayed off the gibberish written in the grime on it, and I feel so out of myself for a minute looking at that, thinking both, “How unremarkable,” in a way? And also, “WHAT THE FUCK.” Because yes, so many people in San Francisco think their life is a movie, or they try to make it that way. So it’s like being surrounded by the Try Too Hard circus, and then there are things that are just genuinely weird, just people on drugs acting the way people on drugs do (which while I notice less than when I moved here, still does not immediately click with me as, “that person is high” and not “what is going on here, am i hallucinating this”), or just the way that you come to expect things that really do not exist outside this bubble. Being shocked a little when I see a Boston Market. Bewildered that this store does not sell those fruit ice creams that have a name I don’t know.

Anyway, I still get dizzy sometimes, I immediately need to take a nap, I can’t even sit up without feeling my heart slow and squeeze unless I think really hard about breathing, so I buy the ticket and 20 minutes later I’m in my house, and I’m lying in bed trying not to freak out, and I’m worried about a lot of things, so I got up to be in the living room, closer to the sound of the crockpot lid if it should fly off or something, and I put on Barry Lyndon. That movie is forever long, the music annoys me, it’s an obligation to watch and in the middle I read on Wikipedia it’s Kubrick’s best because of the natural lighting, so then I think about the lighting, and how bloodless the movie is makes me uncomfortable, and sometime near the end I eat the pot roast, and I drink a pair of Tecate, and I feel that warm detachment from my brain I like for about 10 minutes, and then I hate it, which is why I hate smoking anymore, because it’s way worse and faster, and Jake comes home and we talk about things and that is nice.

I don’t think he liked my pot roast.

1 tiny wine glass