Speaking of which – across the street was a house full of porn, one recently deceased man’s immense personal archive of Playboys and Hustlers dating back to their first tentatively covered issues. My friends had subleased the place from him, and had a bawdy in-memoriam party for their departed landlord full of pizza, severe haircuts, and uncomfortably placed pornography. By then, this was less surprising than tiring. At the previous week’s party I had won a skateboard jousting contest dressed as a medieval plague doctor. I went back to my room with its Valhalla rafters and view of Mount Sutro, rising like a furry head from behind the lit-up University of California San Francisco. At night, all the blazing windows made it nearly impossible to sleep, and I would wake at 2 am convinced I was underwater, looking up at the white underbelly of a boat.

Sometime around the time I tried to start smoking – and it was hard, much harder to start than to quit, because no matter what, I seemed to embarrass myself; the thing would go out because I had forgotten to keep inhaling from it, I would burn holes in my clothing, feel compelled to spit every thirty seconds like I was chewing a wad of tobacco – I received what Ahmed, reincarnation of King Tut and resident breastplate weaver of San Francisco, termed an Egyptian baptism.

Ahmed chased after me one blurry morning during my brief housesit in the Mission District, where the sunlight and number of young people stretched richly right up to 17^th Street’s vertical ascent, and then descent, into the Sunset. After that, the fog and families settled wetly into houses against the edge of the Pacific.

One Steven Sloan, MD, had recently and permanently eliminated my tonsils, two engorged ornaments that had thus far served as dependably gloomy harbingers of chronic throat infections. I could barely speak, and laughs emerged as thin, whistling wheezes. I ingested things like hot cucumber water, hot to simulate soup, which would be calorically gratifying but impossible for its chunkiness. Luckily, I was not yet working in cafes and restaurants, which would, after about two years of nonstop conversing, throw me back into a similar but more embittered state of silence. Instead, I was working at a naming company, which gave new monikers to things like blueberry varieties, volunteer coast guard forces, canine energy drinks, and retirement planning software. During my tonsillectomy recovery, though, I walked daily between the city’s extremes trying in vain to become addicted to cigarettes. To have something to do, and think about, and to be good at. I remember whispering to myself while lighting cigarettes the way you would to a nervous horse: calming, reassuring, preparing the beast for some new hurdle.

I was walking; Ahmed called after me something about my aura and told me he wanted to give me a spiritual reading. I knew before I had finished turning around that I would not be able to say no, not for my physical inability but because I was damn tired of expending all the energy it took to live in San Francisco. Or I was damn tired of withholding from the city that last bit of energy I had reserved for myself, maybe.

As Ahmed and I strolled across Dolores Street, he spoke about his dual life as a half-Haitian High Priest and the reincarnation of King Tutankhamen. One hand held open his black robe so that his breastplate – hand-beaded, he emphasized – glinted into the eyes of all the high young people roasting in the park. Their eyes bounced away, then slid onto me, Ahmed’s unlikely companion in yoga pants and hastily-grabbed orthopedic wedges, and then slid onto his suitcase, pulled along behind us by his other hand.

I didn’t say anything then, and I didn’t say anything as we floated into the higher parts of the park, the young people thinning as we approached the train tracks. We stood, finally, on a landing above the tracks but below the overpass – a middle level, from which I could see everyone but no one could see us. Ahmed’s eyes now seemed unfocused and yellower in the shade than they had seemed in the sun. He baptized me there as the train rattled by us, holding a vial of holy water from his suitcase upside-down over my head, calling me his Nefertari, and smearing my face and neck and shoulders with liquid from two other bottles labeled “sunlight” and “opium.”

Later, I stared at a tile on the shower wall, scraping the scent of patchouli off me with a bar of oatmeal soap, and thought about how I loved this city but how loving it was not possible to do half-heartedly. Kind of like smoking, at least for me.

If you gave San Francisco your all, though, you might be destroyed. All the young people I knew who loved San Francisco, really loved it, who had wormed into the city and never expected to leave, sat right up against its edge. One flew down 38^th Avenue on his skateboard, a beer in each hand, and full-forcedly knocked me into a trashcan. On a solo nighttime walk I turned a corner and stopped: there was the born-and-bred boy I was almost dating, mid-snort. White sand on the back of his hand, him looking at me while I looked at him, crouched and frozen like a midnight raccoon.

Close friends emerged from every drunken bike accident totally unfazed, climbed over the neighborhood police station’s wall to get places faster, unscrewed the auto-locking front wheels from shopping carts and rolled each other away in the hobbled metal baskets, crashed golf carts they had access to at their day jobs. The Richmond, especially, seemed defined by its young and rougish, pushed to this edge of the city for high surf and low rents. I’m pretty sure I was roofied at a party I had only incidentally been invited to by a band of beautiful mustachioed men ambling down the street hours before. I remember receiving my own mustache from a purple Sharpie. I remember dragging my hand along the sides of houses as I stumbled home, navigating with this tactile map of my salty neighborhood.

It was a city, too, of immense coincidence. I wholeheartedly expected to see Ahmed again at some point, and never sat in Dolores Park without one eye open for him. I had told him my name was Carmen, which was unlikely but ultimately less so than Nefertari, and lied about where I worked, but I knew from experience that even in a city as dense and varied and crazy as San Francisco, another run-in was likely. Nearly every day I chanced upon someone I knew or had recently met: on the bus, on the street, in front of me on a bicycle path, on the Internet. OkCupid suggested I date someone I then identified as a neighbor, who I next learned happened to be a friend of the guy I was almost dating; he went to the tiny college in Oregon my brother goes to and was also good friends with the younger sister of my best friend’s roommate – whose boyfriend’s favorite restaurant was the very same one in Laramie, Wyoming that I grew up ordering macaroni and cheese in. Luckily, though, I was wrong about Ahmed.

***

The first meal I ate in San Francisco was a flaccid, three-dollar breakfast burrito given to me in payment for the gigantic marijuana harvest I had performed the night before, high on a mountainside in Northern California, in a room at the end of my boss’s garage. I did not return to the city for four years.

I can’t remember the last meal I ate in San Francisco. I remember feeling dubious, though, that whatever I was eating should be the last part of the city I would ingest after three years of life there, and that whatever it was would reside in me through my plane journey to rural Illinois but not for very long after that.

Now, the time I spent in San Francisco seems fantastical. It was a series of mishaps, and a string of woozy moments in which I noticed the exact way the light filtered through the fog and then glinted off blue and pink houses’ windows, throwing itself through the leaves of trees and the buses full of people. I was never sure if each daily piece of euphoria had to do with this place or with being young.

***

After saying goodbye to my summer boyfriend in the parking lot of a Los Angeles doughnut shop, I drove ten hours up Highway One to my cousin’s house in Montara, where her German shepherd was to rip the crotches out of all of my underwear and leave them scattered on the carpet like slobbery leaves. I found the naming company job, retired at the end of each day to my new room on the third floor of an ex-brothel in the Richmond District, and supplemented my near-nightly meal of Shanghai dumplings with forty ounces of Steele Reserve.

Eight months afterwards, I quit the naming company to take a series of restaurant and cafes jobs, various internships and freelance commitments. The times I most loved San Francisco were those times in which I couldn’t talk about it – rushing around corners on my bicycle so that sights and noises turned algae-colored and silent, the moments in the morning before opening the tiny café, walking through the thickly dark park at night as the incoming fogbank pulled over the moon. Or when my tonsils had just been cut out of my throat.

There were certain periods when I didn’t talk to anyone for days. That was before I realized there was quietness in San Francisco’s noise. The Dia de los Muertos parade pushed through the dark Mission with jangling skeletons, burning sage, and different drum rhythms every ten feet. Something thick hung over all of us there, silence within the loudness, heavy-lidded recognition of the candlelit altars all around. If you danced with enough abandon, you could believe that whatever music was playing in whatever bar you were in wasn’t coming through the speakers. Go stand in the middle of the Big Rec Field in Golden Gate Park at noon on a hot Saturday and feel the baseballs and the kids tear through the air around you, hemmed in by those too-straight trees. Sit on your roof in silence and watch men unload pig carcasses from trucks on the street below, and then look over to your left and see three figures a few lichenous roofs over looking downwards at something else.

***

San Francisco, to me, was made up of its moldering basements and its roofs as much as its glassy and pastel houses. The above-attic expanse seemed in my neighborhood almost a mountainous city itself, built exclusively for cat burglars. The houses nudged into each other and the slippery shingled landscape they formed, dotted with cigarettes and lawn chairs, was forgettable until you were on it. From there I once saw a man standing in front of his windows, which faced the street, and another man in the apartment above him, standing beside his windows, looking out in perfect stillness over the roofs and a gloriously blazing sunset. The man below could not see the sky, just gray wet tree trunks. Unknowingly, he was so close to that beauty.

Driving South to Big Sur with my best friend, I realized my old car was somehow losing power. There was no other way to explain it. Each attempt at acceleration found no new speed. It was like holding down a piano key and hearing nothing. Driving uphill became a question of attaining enough momentum during the previous downhill to make it past the crest. Any anxiety about temporarily leaving San Francisco was heightened as we drove closer to Big Sur and the traffic thinned but the hills gathered.

Eventually, we found ourselves in that specific stand of redwoods tucked between the more open coastal bits of road. We parked, hiked four hairpin miles down to the Big Sur River, and cooked the whole packet of fleshy bacon we’d bought hours before. It was nearly inedible: intestinal curlicues of white fat we had to eat, my companion said, or risk visit by a bear. By then, night had set in and I swallowed those tapeworm shapes blindly. Our tent sat ten feet away. We stripped, hung our clothes on the vague shapes of bushes, and slid into the river. Felt our way over smooth rocks and scratching unknowns to the deeper pool we remembered near the other bank, and there, we uncrouched in the cold, stretched out our bodies so that no skin folded upon itself in escape from the frigid water. The night was almost completely silent. Except for the dark shapes above us, I saw nothing. I said nothing.

***

First image by Brandon Joseph Baker.

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Favorite: “a rider saw two guys selling Starbucks coffee beans out of a suitcase on the back of the 22-Fillmore. Entrepreneurial spirit, no?” Tweet your SF Muni moments or follow for some light reading during those long waits headed Outbound to the Sunset.

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The event will include readings by contributors Camille Hayes, Janet Frishberg, and Rebecca Cohen, in addition to a number of other reproductive-rights writers and activists.

It all goes down March 28 in San Francisco. Check this event page for more details. See you there!

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The opening reception will be held this Friday night at two locations, 2425 17^th St and 744 Alabama St, from 7pm-11pm. There will be open studios on Saturday and Sunday from 12pm-5pm.

Art Explosion features over 140 painters, sculptures, fashion designers, photographers, and jewelers. Best of all, admission and refreshments are free!

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***

Related Posts:

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• Meanwhile,
  The San Francisco Dog Walkers
• MEANWHILE,:
  THE DOLPHIN CLUB
• THE BINS:
  Deal
• Maakies:
  Standup

Farmcore is a documentary about the Farm, a San Francisco community center during the ’70s and ’80s that housed gardens, farm animals, daycare facilities, a library, and…a venue for punk bands like the Dead Kennedys and the Descendents.

Don’t worry if you don’t live in the Bay Area—you can watch the film online.

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• The Rumpus Interview with Octavio Solis

In Lydia, the border and the Rio Grande are powerful images. Growing up in El Paso, so close to the river, had a big impact on Solis. If his birthday had been a few weeks earlier, he would have been born on the other side of the border and his destiny could have been totally different, he says. His Texas background still influences him, but now he considers himself, a resident of the Sunset, a San Franciscan.

A big reason Solis moved to San Francisco more than twenty years ago from Texas was the Magic Theatre and its reputation for new works and nurturing writers such as Sam Shepard and Michael McClure. Within a year of moving here, his play Man of the Flesh was produced on Magic’s stage, followed several years later by Prospect.

Solis, who credits the theatre with helping him get his start, is now back at the Magic with his latest play, Se Llama Cristina. It is billed as “multi-layered fever dream” about a woman and a man who wake up in a strange room with no memory of who they are or how they got there. Oh, and they might be parents who have lost their baby.

Loretta Greco, the artistic director of the Magic (and who is also directing this play), says Se Llama Cristina is the perfect Magic play and quintessentially Solis—muscular, lyrical, and adventurous in structure. While she was in the theatre with the actors rehearsing, I met Solis in the lobby. With a chart and a map showing the journey of the characters from Texas to California on the wall behind him, Solis was working on his iPad. Apologizing for being tired, he talked about how the Magic is all about the writers, how your identity changes when you become a parent, and reinventing himself with every play.

***

The Rumpus: You say this play was inspired by night terrors and being a parent. What night terrors are you talking about?

Octavio Solis: I initially started writing Se Llama Cristina under a different title—Eden Crow, as a pun on “eating crow.” I started writing it when Gracie, my daughter, was just born, back in 1994.  I got twenty pages in, and I shelved it because I didn’t know what I was writing about. I didn’t understand it, I didn’t get it, and I didn’t like it, so I just put it away and worked on something else—mainly worked on being a dad.

But I trotted it out a few years ago when the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts commissioned me to write something after Lydia. So I felt like I could write it now, I could better approach the subject because I am a dad. I’ve had eighteen years with my daughter. I feel like I know that journey a little better, about the trepidation I had about being a parent and whether I’d be a good dad. When you’re in the belly of the beast like that, it’s too dark in there. And it was dark! I was really scared. But she turned out okay. So I feel like I could better approach it.

Night terrors are something children have when they’re asleep and you don’t know why—they just wake up screaming and they’re scared. But I think the night terrors are something we also have as parents, and we imagine at some point after we’ve taken care of them [our children], we have to let them out in the world and we can’t protect them anymore. Hopefully the things we’ve done will kick in when they need them, and she’ll make the right decision. So, the play is about the doubt and fear people have when they have a baby.

Rumpus: How is the play about identity and memory?

Solis: I changed immediately as soon as the baby was born. I had a new title, I was a new person—I was “daddy.” It changed me. So identity is so wrapped up in that notion. As far as memory is concerned, I think in the play, when the characters lose the baby, they can’t remember how. They can’t even remember who they are and their relationship to each other, and it happened because they wish the baby gone. For a time they say, “Let’s just pretend we don’t have a baby now.” It’s almost like…what’s that movie with Jimmy Stewart?

Rumpus: It’s a Wonderful Life.

Solis: Yeah, it’s almost like It’s a Wonderful Life, where he wishes he’d never been born. Well, this is what happens when they wish the baby away, then the baby is gone. That changes everything. They lose their identity that way because they were parents. When you take their parenthood away, you kind of take their relationship away because they were parents.  They start with a blank slate–they don’t know who they are, they don’t know where they are, they don’t even remember having a child. There’s just an empty crib with a chicken leg in it.

So they have to go through a process of remembering everything: they have to go to the beginning [of] their relationship, the genesis, because that’s where the baby begins, when they met. So they go through the path of remembering their way back to their identities and their way back to their baby, and on that path they earn their stripes as parents.

Rumpus: When did you know you wanted to write plays, and how did you decide the theatre was a place you wanted to work professionally?

Solis: I was fourteen years old and got stage-bit when I was cast in the school play. I haven’t looked back since. I was an actor for a while and made the transition to playwright sometime in my mid-twenties.

Rumpus: You say that part of the reason you came out here from Texas was because of the Magic Theatre. Could you talk about that?

Solis: I went to Dallas to get my degree and that’s where I cut my teeth as an actor and a director and a writer, and eventually I started feeling like, I’m a writer. I’d already known the works of Sam Shepard and Michael McClure, and I knew a little of the history of the Magic, and I thought that was the place to go because I was feeling a glass ceiling in Dallas. The other places I thought would be good was Chicago or New York, but I wanted to go to a place with more of a Mexican American experience, so I thought, It’s San Francisco for me.

I knew about the Magic—it had always been kind of a shrine to me for new works. I dreamt of having my works there, but little did I know I would have a play produced in a year of my moving. I had had a reading of this play, Man of the Flesh, so that was my introduction to them. Then five years passed and under the aegis of Mame Hunt [former artistic director of the Magic] I was able to direct Prospect, and had a lovely time with that.  Then I got busy with other theatres. I was developing a national reputation, so I was working a lot, and I fell out of the Magic’s umbrella, especially after Mame left. When Loretta came, we knew each other from the Public, [and so] I knew she understood my work. When she came here five years ago, she said, “I want to commission you.” I was so busy! I was working with Shadowlight Theater and the Oregon Shakespeare Company, and Lydia was at the Denver Center, and I was working on Cloudlands, my musical, but she brought me in as a director for The Brothers Size here. It was fantastic–it was really good.

So that was my new relationship with the Magic. Then Loretta commissioned me to write a play for her. We had a reading of it last year, and I’m still working on it. Then out of the blue she calls me, and says she wants to produce this play. She said, “I think the title’s wrong–you called it Baby Girl, but I think the title’s in the play, Se Llama Cristina.” I almost did a spit-take when she called me. I was working on my musical down at South Coast Rep. I was astonished. That play—when the Denver Center passed on it after a couple of workshops, I didn’t take it personally. I thought, This is the biz, and they still believe in me and want to commission me to do some more. They said, “This isn’t for us,” and I kind of agreed, so I shelved the play. I couldn’t think about it because I was doing so much at the time. I was teaching at Austin and working on my musical.

Loretta found the play through Shirley Fishman who works at La Jolla Playhouse. She had attended a reading of it at the Denver Center, but she said, “This is a Magic play.” They all read it, they all agreed and all loved it unanimously, so they all wanted it in their season. So all they had to was notify me, and ask me to change the title.

Rumpus: Did you have any problem with that?

Solis: Oh, no—heck no. I didn’t even like Baby Girl. I thought that was just a start. A good start, but still not the right title. This is the title. It really makes sense. So Loretta and I sat here across from each other and we read the entire play, her and I reading all the parts and then she gave me some notes. Then in October we had a little workshop on it at Oregon Shakespeare Company, and then I did a rewrite after that. I got some notes and that’s where we built this chart for the play.

Rumpus: You say you dreamed of having a play at Magic. What about it drew you?

Solis: They really put their money where their mouth is as far as new work is concerned. They do daring new plays, but also plays that have literary merit. It’s for the writer. They do new works in other cities all the time, but it always seems to be about the actors. Theatre companies like Steppenwolf and Goodman—those places are known for tremendous, powerful acting, actors who are now movie stars. The Magic didn’t spawn a lot of movie stars, but it spawned a lot of great writers, great plays. So the emphasis is always on the writing. I’m doing the kind of writing that really stretches the notions of reality. This isn’t the place for realism at all. There are ways in which they like to bend time and realism and do things that are just crazy, and that suits me.

Rumpus: Who influenced you in theatre?

Solis: Maria Irene Fornes and Eric Overmyer are my theatre influences. But I am also influenced by artists in other fields, like Tom Waits and Cormac McCarthy.

Rumpus: How has being a Latino playwright influenced your writing and the types of stories you want to tell? And how is it being a Latino playwright working within American theatre culture, which has been so much about white experience?

Solis: I don’t think of myself as a Latino playwright. That’s a label others place on me. I’m just writing for the theatre. Because of my upbringing and my past, I inevitably delve into issues of my Latino heritage, but it’s not my Latino-ness that dictates what I write. There are stories that take place along the border near El Paso because that’s where I am from, and because I think that region is full of untold stories. But even as many of my characters are of Mexican descent, I feel that their tales are universal stories of love and betrayal and loss.

I’m still trying to keep others from pigeon-holing me as this or that kind of writer. No one thought of August Wilson as a Black playwright. He was simply a writer portraying the lives of African Americans in this country, and at some point in the telling, people realized that they were seeing stories about themselves. There are so many ambiguous expectations of what a “Latino play” must do, and how it must represent its people, none of which match the reality of their lived experiences. But that’s what happens when people deal with “the Other”. They tend to want it to conform to preconceived notions, or to glamorize or exoticize it. I’m just interested in showing Latinos as people with the same capacities to succeed or fail in their lives like anyone else.

I go back and forth with this term–Latino playwright–and wrestle with its ramifications. Sometimes it means I am appreciated more but only within this rubric, and sometimes it makes me visible to a wider audience with no access to the culture. So there are benefits and pitfalls. Still, if I don’t tell these stories about the people I share my culture with, someone else will. So I feel a responsibility to share what I can. The use of Spanish in the title of this new work is indicative of how culture matters in the story.  And my characters go from being Vespa to Vera, and Mike to Miguel, and become aware of the character changes within them and how they will factor in the struggles of the play.

Rumpus: How do you think your writing style has changed?

Solis: It changes from play to play. I try not to repeat myself. I really work on reinventing my style in some respects. But some things never change. I’ve always had an emphasis on language and lyrical language at that. Language that seems both profane and realistic but that can soar and sound almost angelic and kind of poetic. So those things don’t change, but from play to play I’m a different writer. The play I’m writing for the Magic now is very different than this one. I have a wide palette to work with. I don’t just sort of do variations on a theme. That’s why I enjoy working with different theatre companies, or writing an adaptation of a novel like Pastures of Heaven and Don Quixote. Those things stretch me in ways that this does not. But then I get to do some things here I could never do in Don Quixote. Every theatre has its aesthetic and I have to find my way through that to my play. Oregon Shakes has that outdoor stage and there’s a certain kind of stage you can do there. This kind of play would never survive there. You need a tight, small, pressure cooker experience of the Magic to be able to do it.

Rumpus: When I talked to you a couple years ago about Lydia, you talked about having grown up near the Rio Grande and how that influenced your writing. How does San Francisco influence your writing?

Solis: Now I really feel like a San Franciscan. I’ve been here long enough I feel like I’m now firmly entrenched in the legacy that includes people like Sam Shepard and Armistead Maupin and Dashiell Hammett, and Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the great poets of the Beat Era. There’s a strong writers’ base here, and I feel like I’m part of that tradition now. But that doesn’t mean I have to forsake where I’m from or who I am as a Latino. That’s what I bring here, that tradition, and I don’t lose that. I still end up going back to Texas. And this play, which goes from Texas to California, really accurately reflects the kind of journey I’ve had as a writer and a person. But I’m now a Californian–I’m a San Franciscan.

***

Se Llama Cristina is a National New Play Network Rolling World Premiere. It opened January 30th and runs through February 17th at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. After the Magic production, it will go on to the Kitchen Dog Theater in Dallas and The Theatre @ Boston Court in Pasadena.

***

Photograph of Sarah Nina Hayon and Sean San José in Se Llama Cristina © 2013 by Jennifer Reiley.

Photograph of Octavio Solis © 2010 by Ed Ritger.

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• Non-fan Nato’s Guide to Super Bowl Rioting

In one season, our City—Bill O’Reilly’s favorite punchline for everything fey and un-American—may defeat the nation in baseball and football. It almost makes me want to bring a rodeo to the Cow Palace so our Big Gay Rodeo can break records for team milking and bucking bronco.

Some people like sports, while I prefer to derive my sense of self-worth from my own achievements. But I don’t judge. I’ve studied sports fans. I speculate that what people really like is being fans. Once you start shouting at the television and talking up the achievements of millionaire athletes as “we,” you are not enjoying sports so much as the sensation of being a fan.

When the 49ers destroyed the Broncos in the 1990 Super Bowl, I watched the game at the now-defunct Scott’s Comics & Cards on 23^rd and Mission, pre-dotcom boom, when the Mission was still the domain of recent immigrants, artists, and punks. Scott’s was like Cheers for headbanger comic book nerds. The Victorian next door housed legendary thrash-funk band the Limbomaniacs. When the 49ers won, rather than rioting, MIRV pushed an amp onto the window sill to blast some face-melting guitar. Then commenced a mosh pit in the middle of the street uniting jubilant skaters and cholos.

Based on my limited understanding of professional sports, when your team wins a championship, you have a constitutional right to riot. I don’t know much about sports, but I do know about protesting and riots. I’ve been marching and protesting and gesticulating angrily at scabs and cops since I was in diapers. By which I mean high school.

Helpfully, Mayor Lee has established the obvious connection between corporate sports-related mayhem and anti-capitalist mayhem. As the Mayor says, my expertise in Occupy protesting obviously translates to sports rioting. So that everyone gets the most out of a 49ers Super Bowl, here are tips from a non-fan for rioting for sports fans:

• San Francisco police are on your side, and plan to start rioting with you as soon as they finish work. Unless you’re African-American, in which case they might shoot you. Or put you on BART so a BART cop can shoot you for them.

• Tired cops are more dangerous than rested cops. Before you scream at a pig to fuck themselves back to Novato (aka Copland-West), pause to ask how much overtime they’ve done. If they’ve been at work for more than ten hours, yell “Go Niners!” and find a cop who’s still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

• When confronting police, size does matter. If you’re a 104-pound malnourished vegan, adorable skinny jeans won’t suffice. Bulk up before the big game with a week of carbs and ribs.

• Stretch. Apparently a good stretching program is the secret to the 49ers’ triumphs. Don’t pull a hamstring and have to sit out the fun while suffering through a therapeutic soak at Kabuki.

• Hydrate, but pee first. Good rioting (and possible time in the klink) requires carefully calibrating your fluids. You don’t want to be blindsided mid-havoc wreaking by a dehydration headache. On the other hand, you also don’t want to load up on kombucha and have to ask politely to use the rest room at an Urban Outfitters you just razed.

• Wear layers. The weather can change suddenly, and on occasions like this we’re especially likely to get doused with prosecco. Stay warm, bring a beanie, and be ready to adjust for weather swings.

• If you must destroy property, make sure it warrants destruction. For example, leave the busted Corolla on Duboce alone and destroy a shiny SUV taking up two compact parking spaces. Don’t smash up local business or taxpayer-funded public assets like buses. Don’t trash your ride home. On the other hand, no one will cry if a foreclosure-happy bank gets a comeuppance.

• Mayor Lee is encouraging business to cut down on hard alcohol sales. This is a great opportunity to showcase our fantastic local beers and wines. They’re not just for pairing with grilled rabbit and duck confit. They can be for blackout drinking and berserker rage too.

• “The Pistol offense” and “shotgun formation” are metaphors.

• If you run out of things to smash, bike on by the tony new SOMA pied a terre condo towers or up to Billionaires’ Row in Pacific Heights. Politely ask the doorman if you can go floor to floor like Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. He’ll say no and then wink knowingly.

• When flipping a car, lift with the knees, not the back. If you have any chronic pain or injuries that limit your ability to flip a car, try instead flipping a Vespa, Fiat, Segway, or fixed-gear bike. We riot in a manner inclusive of people with disabilities.

• Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo is the most vocal pro-gay marriage football player. In San Francisco, it’s totally ok to riot in solidarity with him, or to demand to make out with him. He’s CUTE!

• On this day only, when someone shouts, “Who’s got it better than us?” the answer is not, “The 1%!”

Or, you could not riot. Make a poem or cartoon about the rioting you would have done instead.

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As completely bizarre as that sentiment sounds to those of us living in San Francisco these days, the world he describes rings true, from Mountain View’s office parks to the Outer Sunset’s peripheral charm.

Mostly, he (perhaps inadvertently) underscores the fact that the Bay Area is its own entity and can’t be neatly mapped onto the concept of New York.

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How many nights, after wandering hours, have I landed in one of the broken down easy chairs at Adobe Books? All the conversations I have listened to. I’ll miss a place where people actually talk to each other.

When it closes for good, sometime next month, some will mourn but not nearly enough. And Adobe too will be replaced with another sleek, high end clothing store. I’m afraid there is nothing unique about this lament.

All the books are now 60% off, but Andrew McKinley, among the kindest and most generous bookstore owners on earth, will still try and make you pay even less.

Last night I bought The Collected Stories of Wolfgang Hildesheimer. The book was originally listed at 9.95. Then it went down to 6.50. 60% off of 6.50 is, what? I’m terrible at math. I tried to pay four dollars. Andrew wouldn’t take it. He’d only accept three bucks, his final offer.

Is there another place in the universe can you buy The Collected Stories of Wolfgang Hildesheimer at one o’clock in the morning?

Wolfgang Hildesheimer by the way is – was – a very good, and funny, German story writer. Among the stories in the book is one called, “I Am Not Writing A Book On Kafka.”

Evil tongues, or rather their owners, claim (and I can see them sneering) that I am writing a book on Kafka. This accusation is false, I repudiate it. For I am working on a book on Golch.

No, the narrator is not writing a book on Kafka. The narrator is writing a book on Golch! Of course, Golch. Golch, an unknown schoolteacher from the town of Altzmunzach, a town in which the express trains do not stop…

Golch taught English and German at the High School for Daughters (this institution actually existed then and still does today)….

Don’t you all see what we are losing? If this city still has a soul, it’s at Adobe.

So long books I will never find. So long Wolfgang Hildesheimer. So long, Adobe Books. 16^th Street will never be the same, and neither will we.

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• THE LONELY VOICE #20: WILLIAM MAXWELL IN THE DECEMBER RAIN
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