As luck would have it, my old friend Topaz is playing a show in New York the night before I leave town and in San Francisco the night I arrive, making me very, very happy and giving me excuses to say hey on either end of my itinerary.
Hell, maybe he’ll play guitar. I didn’t even know he could do that — that’s how good he is.
Update: Due to popular demand, and a meager bank account, it’s looking like burritos in the Mish followed by a houseparty in the Dogpatch. Taqueria San Francisco at seven?
It’s 7:52 in the morning, and I haven’t slept in sixteen hours. I’ve got a journalism paper already two weeks late and a documentary proposal final due tomorrow, I have to present footage from my student film which looks worse and worse each retrospect to class in a few hours, and I have two physics books and have a dozen problem sets to plow through before the final test that will basically determine my grade in a week. And all of this to make good on the college degree I already spent about eleven semesters not getting the first time around.
I am fucked.
That, however, isn’t news to anyone who knows me particularly well. I seem to exist in a perpetual state of fucked-ness. This is what was on my mind as I walked down the block for a coffee and a lox bagel meant to be the special treat that gets me through what promises to be a shitty, anxious day — and that’s if it’s productive. The little Brooklyn nabe I’ve called home for the last few months was quiet and grey, with working people going about their business completely unawares of the coffee-sipping, cigarette-smoking walking crisis in their midst.
It was the perfect walk to make that kind of random mental connection that I’ve always taken unsubstantiated pride in: A scarily apt metaphor for the seemingly endless bouts with writer’s block I’ve been experiencing the last two years is Steve Sax Disease. Unlike Lou Gehrig (and if I’m anything, I’m unlike Lou Gehrig), this isn’t a tragic yet noble actual disease — Parkinson’s, in Gehrig’s case. No, instead it’s a mental block that makes what was once the simplest of tasks a neurotic torment, and makes the sufferer look like a complete buffoon.
I'm a writer and web geek living in beautiful San Francisco, California. Here I occasionally post things that cross my mind. You can find my professional work at Valleywag... (more)
