I got reading over some of the earlier posts and it got me thinking. Thinking’s not even the right word… just got me consciously being I guess you could say. Realizing where I am. Realizing the sound of the dryer spinning away on a load of Richard’s laundry, realizing the heat and the sweat residue on my skin, the ceiling fan and the shadows it casts, the checkered floor in our kitchen, the bathroom doorknobs that keep falling off, the things that I own, the things that make up my day to day, the missed calls that I have, the text messages I’ve received and sent, the “community” in which I live.

There are many things here. Dry is not one of them. Bored is not one of them. Lonely is not one of them. There is ecstatic joy and excitement, and then there is fear and recklessness and confusion. There are still unfulfilled longings, and then there are longings that are fulfilled and yet desire that remains and with that comes this subtle emptiness like waking up on Monday morning and knowing you can’t get the weekend back. And though that’s such a simple and common thing, the Monday morning blues, it’s so telling and huge to me. It’s like getting on an airplane and leaving a place you’ve grown to know.

This weekend Luke and I had a rave date of sorts and he took ecstasy for the first time. It was a beautiful day, in fact it grows more and more beautiful the further from it I get. It was 11 hours long. It was more interesting and good than it was fun, I would say. Granted, I had a lot of fun, but it was the type of fun that is heavy. Throughout the course of the afternoon and sunset and the long long night I understood how we were 24 and that in the blink an eye we would be 27 and another blink and we’re 32 and I understood how far we’ve come and how all our thoughts of love and truth seem like distant dreams now, fantasies of our childhood. Fantasies of our undeveloped minds. Fantasies and fantasies and here we are like children smiling and dancing amidst big trees with glowing lanterns and putting on prism glasses and walking through tunnels of Christmas lights and meeting new people and throwing our hands in the air and screaming when the low frequency oscillator does that wobble thing that gets people so excited. To be children for a night.

When we’re children we imagine. When we’re adults we experiment. We experiment with having jobs, with taking drugs, with moral freedom, with responsibility, with chaos.

And we’re always busy.

And I’m busy now, and I have to run. And I feel accomplished because I finally set aside 45 minutes to sit by myself and try to think about things, at least a little. And I checked my voicemail and its from you and you sound distressed, so we should talk soon.

I’m reading Kafka on the Shore by Murakami, and these two paragraphs got me:

“I take a bus back to the station and have a steaming bowl of udon in the same diner as the day before. I take my time, gazing out the window as I eat. The station’s packed with people streaming in and out, all of them dressed in their favorite clothes, bags or briefcases in hand, each one dashing off to take care of some pressing business. I stare at this ceaseless, rushing crowd and imagine a time a hundred years from now. In a hundred years everybody here – me included – will have disappeared from the face of the earth and turned into ashes or dust. A weird thought, but everything in front of me starts to seem unreal, like a gust of wind could blow it all away.

I spread my hands out in from of me and take a good hard look at them. What am I always so tense about? Why this desperate struggle just to survive? I shake my head, turn from the window, clear my mind of thoughts of a hundred years away. I’ll just think about now. About books waiting to be read in the library, machines in the gym I haven’t worked out on. Thinking about anything else isn’t going to get me anywhere.”

Why this desperate struggle just to survive?

I love and miss you Sam. Recently I’ve been taking extra-long bike rides to and from work. I start the day before sunrise, riding through the city streets and Golden Gate Park, having a quiet moment on the shore of the Pacific Ocean as the sky is beginning to color itself. It’s enchanting. Yesterday I picked up some Corona’s on my way home for our family dinner. Tamales and refried beans. It was delicious, but as we were sitting there having dinner a strange feeling swept over me. There in front of me was my mom with her curly black hair and stories of work at Stanford. There to my right was my Dad and his evangelic idealism and old man worries. There to my left was my sister, talking about her new year’s resolutions, diets, and pursuing her MBA at Berkley or Stanford.

And here I was in my chair, and then I vanish. My mom and sister continue in conversation, my dad continues shuffling food around his plate and contemplating the bowl of chips.

I am leaving my family. I am leaving this table for four.

I am in a tent on shore of California with rain pattering on the fly. I am on the floor of an apartment in Los Angeles County. I am in a tangle of bodies, the bride of my dreams. I am not here, this isn’t happening.

Do I know my family? Do I love my family? What does family mean to me? Why do I feel so far from them? Why does the topic of this insatiable restlessness and hunger feel like the Elephant in the room everyone is ignoring? Come to think of it, there are Elephants all over this room. There’s the sadness we all feel for my sister, the sadness we feel that she feels, the sadness that is so happy and content. That Elephant is on the table, stamping around on the tamales, slurping up the salsa with his big trunk, it’s so loud I can barely hear myself think. There’s my parent’s fear of what it means to be normal adults, my mom struggling with the mundane aggravations of a 9 to 5 job, those aggravations are so petty and insignificant and you know it’s so yet somehow it still matters and that is the fear, and THAT elephant is roaring in front of our new 30 inch flat screen TV. There’s my dad’s sense of loss for the automatic sense of significance one is granted by being a religious figurehead in foreign lands, and that elephant is running around the kitchen like a maniac, throwing shit out of the fridge and kicking over our compost bin and tossing our IKEA plates like Frisbees.

And this is why little Lugo the cat sprints from room to room like an unmedicated lunatic, jumping with fear at the smallest sound and nervously scratching at the couches and pillows; because he sees these Elephants. He sees their legs like mighty towers smashing on our hardwood floors and plowing into our freshly painted Mediterranean yellow walls. He knows the giddily careless death of the elephants. Run, Little Lugo, RUN! Run for your fucking life! Run and run and never stop running!

Happy two thousand and eleven, brother. And on into the Future…

Today at work I hugged everyone goodbye on my way out at sundown. For a moment it felt like it could be the last, that stomach lifting sensation of strolling out of a place that was and is something that one final time. The reality and existential weight of every inch of my way home is heightened. Whizzing  on my bike through the traffic up Columbus Avenue; strolling with no hands down the Stockton Tunnel. Market Street. The Greenway. A left on Valencia. Flocks of Hipsters on fixed gears. A right on 24th street. Up a hill and to my parent’s house. How many times have I traversed this path? What did I think about the first time and the fourth and the twenty-seventh and the hundred and fifth and the last?

Dinner: Soup, homemade bread, Calzone, two cans of Coca-Cola. Whiny kittens running through our legs. My sister and her boyfriend and my Mom and my Dad. E v e r y D a y C o n v e r s a t i o n.

I get home and I step out on the balcony for a cigarette. I come back inside. My room is a mess. So much I need to do. I need to finish recording that song. I need to pack. I need to do laundry. I need to clear all these empty beer cans out of my room. I need to get a beer.

I’m drinking a beer. It’s fizzy and light.

Dear Brain, it’s time for a Bubble Bath.

Brain shuffles a bit and closes it’s eyes and covers itself with a blanket of time-crunching hindsight. One year I’ve been here. What has happened? Who have I loved? I have loved no one. I have missed those that I love. I have grown bored. I have began to drink. I have continued to smoke. I have become twenty-three and sometimes I’m really frightened that something real has passed and I’m never going to get it back.

I go to sleep. Tomorrow is a new day.

Today I woke up on my bedroom’s hardwood floor and realized it was August 8th. There went July. There went June. There went my mattress: rolled up, dusted off, and shoved into one of the corners of my room. I hate mattresses.

Presently: a remotely attractive girl stands outside the window of L’s unlocking her bike, placing the steel U into her basket, glancing around 24th street with careless eyes under her sexy black helmet. When I walked into the coffee shop we made and sustained eyes. She was drinking a glass of wine. I ordered a beer. We must have so much in common, sexy biker girl.

Earlier in the day I was at my bike shop and this other girl with possibly even more beautiful eyes asked me if we sold detailed maps of San Francisco’s bike routes. I told her we did and asked her if she lived here in the city. She said she did. Every week she chooses two parks at random (she draws their names from a deep top-hat), and then regardless of how near or far the two parks are from each other, she rides to each of them and just spends time soaking in their presence. I thought that was dead sexy, so I unfolded the map for her and told her the best way to get to her next park in Daly City. These are the Things you’ll see along the away. These are the Streets you ought to avoid.

A swarm of people walked in at that moment, adding to the swarm that was already in there waiting with their credit cards and stressed out families for some bicycles. When I moved from the girl, the sea of eager bodies promptly closed between us. Chomping mouths dying for a memorable experience. We made eye contact four more times while she stood at the front counter with the map open. Soon I was shouting directions at a crowd of twenty-plus people, whipping the counter with my pointer, not hearing the words that were coming out of my mouth but watching her figure out of the corner of my eye. Movement. The folding of the map, the turn of the shoulders. Eye contact once more. Maybe one day you’ll pull out Dolores from your hat, and maybe that day I’ll be there. So long, my park dwelling Goddess.

Everybody is so close; their souls so tangible, dropped into this modern dream city. A web where we roll around like drunken spiders and feed off one another’s blood.

So I’ve made new friends. There’s Peter, my next door neighbor, a gay chinese young man who was born and raised in the one and only Bay Area. He was raised on Awana, contemporary Worship rock, and other such delights of a conservative Christian upbringing. Every so often his home church in San Jose will come to the city to rally against homosexuality. He hasn’t gone back there in over three years. He still loves them and what they are but he fears them. He fears their love and what it might expect of him. He fears the letdown he’s sure to deliver.

Presently his Grandma, an eighty-something-year-old traditional Chinese Christian women,  is living with the delusion that her ninety-year-old husband is having an affair with their fifty-something-year-old in-house nurse. This with the pretext of sixty years of marriage. His Grandpa now sleeps on the couch, a wrinkly sheet of decades-old skin peering through sunken eyes at his quiet midnight living room. No breath beside him, no dream stirred body to upset his rest.

Peter and I stay up late smoking Pot and talking about life. On multiple occasions we’ve realized how close we are to sunrise and we resolve that this time we’re gonna make it. We also go out dancing often, sometimes just the two of us. I make up for the lack of more company with stronger and more frequent drinks. Last Saturday night we went to Temple to see a rave DJ from LA. We drunkenly rode our bikes there, drunkenly polished off a coke bottle spiked stiff with Rum, and drunkenly entered our nocturnal playground. We spent two hours inside, during which, as I was told later, we ordered more drinks. I don’t remember those, but I do remember dancing with this little Asian girl that didn’t speak any English. After a couple songs I could no longer keep my balance, and after one to many trips I think she walked away. So long, my Asian beauty.

Sometimes I get quietly upset at Peter for little oddities about whatever, but most the time I’m very grateful for his presence. Though, yes, when I sit back and think about it I often understand that I perceive him as a patch over a gaping hole that all you bastards left. A dispensable character that at the moment is significant but  will someday be one of those people that I hung out with a lot at this certain given time and hmm isn’t that strange?

Peter and I went to a liturgical church this last Sunday. He looked terrified to meet my Mom even though I told him homosexuality was a non-issue to her. He was nervous, and I became embarrassed at his nervousness. There is little like being embarrassed about your friends around your parents. Be a man, I wanted to say.

Presently: the gray-haired barrel-chested homeless man that scouts up and down 24th street is standing under my window. “Hey, catfish hunter!” he shouts, “yeah catfish hunter, get over there.”

And then there’s this girl named Alesha. A punk artist girl who’s lived at the same quaint apartment on VanNess for five years straight, right across from the old brick Cathedral that’s been purchased by the Academy of Art University and turned into a lecture hall for classes of 100 or more, where the shepherd excites his flock with illusions of Grandeur camouflaged as a search for human expression.

Alesha has all these notebooks all over her house, one of the covers says, in green marker, “DICKIN AROUND AND SHIT.” Inside there are many photos. One of them is of this “babe” in his last couple weeks of life. Young and boney, sitting nude in a bathtub full of polaroids. A smokey ashtray and dark green bottle sitting at the feet of the tub. Her hero. The Heroine Angel. The embracer of death.

While we talk late at night she receives texts from her stripper friend Vanessa about how she wants to throw up on stage.

Every work night Vanessa gets dizzily drunk and strips for the seedy out-of-town folk that infest North Beach like little cockroaches. Then she texts Alesha the shittiest things in the Universe.

And yet despite the monsters decorating Alesha’s walls (mangled Victoria’s Secret photos with upside down crosses, testicular creatures with dicks for hands, and, my favorite, a hybrid Jesus/Mickey Mouse with a handful full of cigarettes and needles and a pimpled face), there is this effervescent bubbly-ness that pervades her every action.

We had chemistry for a few days, I would say. We did until we had a big conversation about religion and life and all this stuff. And then it was like a bucket of ice was dumped in my skinny jeans. There was no awe, how do I describe? I was done. She was done. She looked at me and said she was going to bed. I was welcome to stay of course, but I told her I needed to ride my bike home and listen to the new Chemical Brother’s album.

When I got home I stripped to my underwear, smoked a fat bowl and hooped to the whole album. By the last tracks I was just lying on the floor moving my fingers to the beat. She the music was crawling over my tired body making love to every inch of my skin. When I watched the video of it the next day it was just me lying on the floor listening to techno, but oh at the moment it was something else.

Sometimes I just don’t feel like calling you or Richard. Just like sometimes I don’t feel like masturbating. Sure it feels nice, but if it aint the real thing than it just aint worth the effort. I get sick of having only half of everybody I love. Not even half, just the idea of them. It would be easier if I never saw or thought about them again, I tell myself.

Of course I love talking to you. I never feel more myself than after I’ve had one of those long conversations with you.

I don’t know who I am half the time. Especially now, making new friends. The closer you get to someone the more you become them and they become you, and here I am with new people in a new place, being a leader at my work, bossing people around, making money, coming home and hitting the bottle hard every night, kickin it with the fam, loving my parents, exercising in dark rooms to Radiohead, reading Kurt Vonnegut, trying to wrap my mind around all this shit.

I really want you to move to San Francisco. I want you to know. I could fill that statement with base-covering pretexts and disclaimers, but it is what it is and I’ll let it stand on its own. Sometimes I just want to call and say Fuck Denver! You have a fucking place to stay here for free until you have a job! But I don’t, because I wouldn’t want a decision like that to be one I or anyone talks you or anyone into.

Life’s strange. Shit’s been fun as a cat chasing a laser pointer around the living room. I want you to move here, but I’m O K if you don’t, of course. Miss you, and much love.

almost to the point of tears, and I can’t explain exactly why. It’s 3 AM and I just got home, I have some guests sleeping in my bed and I’m just staring at a satellite image of the San Francisco peninsula, bewildered. That’s all.

The future itself is a heavy silhouette seated at the edge of your bed, and you can feel your mattress bend ever so slightly under its weight.

How few people see all of Sam Diaz? How few of your students understand the entirety of being you are trying to teach them? How few of your co-workers know the youthful love and life you wish to give? Those who see all of you are few and fortunate, and I think that even as you sleep right now, despite the many screaming voices staging senseless scenes in your head, you really know this. You really do.

I answered phone call after phone call: Oh, why yes, the electric bike is a great choice, it’s like biking made easy, I took one for a ten mile ride the other day, no sweat! Road bikes? Of course! We’ve got four models of high end road bikes, all full carbon with combo Shimano 105 and Ultegra components, I took one of our Stelvio’s for a sixty mile ride the other day, and it was great!



How long? Well it’s just eight miles over to Sausalito, a little over an hour of pedaling. And the great news is that right outside our front door there’s a brand new national park bike path with no more cars! You’ll take that along the water all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge, where you’ll cross on the sidewalk, then on the other side it’s just ten minutes cruising downhill to Sausalito. That’s a beautiful little coastal town with a bunch of neat restaurants and shops right on the water, most people choose to eat, drink, hang out there, then they put their bikes on a ferry boat and come right on back to San Francisco where they started!


I hang up the phone. One, two, ten, twenty times before 9:30 in the morning. Then there’s always that split second right after I set the handset down: the moment of silence when I exit the self-contained universe of electro-magnetic communication. What was I just saying? Was I just speaking to a human? Am I a human? Maybe I’m just another voice,  jabbering away through a cyclical network of telephone lines in cyberspace; like a never ending game of Pacman.


When I first started working here eight months ago, I spoke to a different person every phone call. Every angry customer was a threat, and every kind customer was a friend. The shy, cute voices were potential lovers. The young guy from the youth hostel, a potential best friend. The restaurant owner from Tiburon was royalty. The concierge from the Sheraton was a fellow slave to the tourism industry.



But as the new and eager-eyed days blurred into weeks, and as those weeks stacked together into months, I started talking to fewer and fewer people on the phone. By December it was down to about fifteen different individuals. Road Biker. Asshole. Proud Father. Concerned Mother. Broke Teenager. Japanese Tourist. Indian Man. DMC. Bitch. Sweetheart.



Come April and I’m talking to the same three people all day long. We’re jabbering around the wires, chasing one another in circles, chomping away at each other’s throats. Every month tumbles into the next and the movement from one to the other becomes less and less distinct. Soon I’ll be strewn in this river: numb, beaten, floating and unaware of any bend or obstruction. Talking gibberish with the exact same person all day long, I’ll just leave my mouth hanging open and let the words spill out.



Somedays when I look at earth from space, I like to scroll up to where the map ends and the ominous gray area begins. Maybe if we could just make it out there, everything would be perfectly quiet. We wouldn’t need to eat, sleep, or even speak, we’d just walk around on that vast plain with each other. At first, only a few restless souls would make there way out there, though slowly but surely word would make it’s way down south. People would quit their jobs, park their cars, hang up their suits, unplug their refrigerators and head up north. Most people wouldn’t even lock their front doors behind them. The half full fruit baskets would mold over, gallons of milk would go sour, and all the chickens in the chicken farms would, for once, die of old age.