Excerpt from 2005

You’d like to believe the city calls, but it doesn’t. All it’s doing is staying quiet, that great lighted joke across the bay. Look now, five o’clock and already dark, already the sun has quieted itself under the horizon, setting the sky to flame and ultimately to dark ruin. Dark ruin, you think, muttering to yourself, laughing under bated breath. That’s funny. You like to watch the city as it sinks into the bay and rises again at sunset, standing in this muddy little corner of a place you can’t call home. There’s nothing of it that is a home, though you like to think of anywhere you stand as home. The five feet around you, that’s home, that’s what you used to think. Then you moved here and the circumference shrunk. You couldn’t afford much else, so tight are the limits to which your dollar will stretch, and so you came to West Oakland, this jutting little peninsula off a cocksure ruin of a city, and you stand at this smeary window, and you watch the woman called San Francisco sell herself for absolutely no cash.