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San Francisco it is
Tuesday, February 22 2000
The best thing that could possibly happen right now would be a devastating earthquake in San Francisco. There are too many fair-weather Johnsons there trying to get rich quick on that dot com boom, and they're driving up the rent. If Shiva Thor Christ would just topple a few skyscrapers and put some cracks in the bridges, the place would clear out nicely and Kim and I wouldn't find ourselves paying $3000/month for a leaky loft in the Mission.
You see, we've decided to move to San Francisco. The city lies just north of the center of everything internet and just south of the center of everything tantra. It's our natural destination.
San Diego was just a staging ground, a place to accumulate some essential skills and a wad of cash (and other forms of equity) before storming the famed city by the bay. And we haven't done too badly. After a year and a half, I have stock options conservatively worth many tens of thousands of dollars, and when I went to the bank today I was delighted to discover that I had another dozen thousand available in the form of easily-accessible cash. Back in September of 1998, when we left Michigan, we were in no position to move to San Francisco. But now we can, and we can do it with the brute force of bank notes if need be.
Of course, I still need a job, and Kim and I need to actually find a place to live. And we have to break our lease and pack our shit and drive up the coast in a big clunky UHaul decorated with an ugly graphic representing one of the fifty states. That's a lot to do in a month.
We were so confident with our position that in the evening we went out and did what Kim likes doing most, eating sushi (including sea urchin eggs). But we didn't go up to any fancy place up in La Jolla; we went to the sushi place on Newport Avenue in our own downtown Ocean Beach. Kim had maintained a fairly snobby attitude towards the place (even cheering Sophie for taking a crap in front on one occasion), but for some reason that attitude was absent today.
We at sushi and sake at the sushi bar beside an aging Schteve who was probably in his forties. Anyone that age in a sushi bar is either going through a midlife crisis or otherwise has an unusual interest in youth fashion and style. I read some years back that if you were 33 years old and had never eaten sushi, chances were good that you never would. The aging Schteve to our left was, you might say, your typical loud American, maintaining a non-stop banter with the sushi chefs about all sorts of uninteresting things. "California Rolls are easy to eat," he declared nonsensically. Then he asked one of the chefs, "Do you speak Japanese very often?" though it was clear Japanese was his first language. "Do either of you know Chinese?" he continued. What are you supposed to do with a guy like that but nod your head, avoid eye contact, and pretend you're very busy?
I've been listening to the new CD by Filter with the idiotic title Name of Record (an earlier album had the much better title Short Bus). Kim got it yesterday in exchange for that dreadful Enigma CD she'd accidentally bought. Name of Record is like slightly goth-flavored techno-grunge, and some of it is good. There's a consistent airplane theme going through most of the lyrics that would seem to recommend it as travel music, particularly for a UHaul-ride up the California coast. My favorite song on the album right now is a hot little dance song called "The Best Things." But there's also a tune that lies somewhere between the styles of Bob Mould and GBV called "I'm Not the Only One," though it's rather weak.
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