Today's writing

I came to Berkeley at the age of 26. Like everyone else here, I was looking for something. Two decades later, I’m still not certain that I’ve found it. That’s what time does – if it doesn’t give you what you’re seeking, at least it blunts your desire for it. When it’s not sharpening it to the point of heart failure.

In other words, I still have no idea what I’m doing with myself, my life, my time here on the spinning orb. I want to walk around, checking in from table to table, asking: Do you?

But you don’t do that here. There’s a certain sanctity in being alone in public, a social contract: thou shalt not communicate. And most of the time I’m so very grateful for it.

Today is different, as it always is when you start a tale. That’s how I learned to tell a story: why is today different than any other day? Or maybe that was a prayer I said in synagogue. It’s really all the same thing.

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When I first moved here I lived in a three-story house on Sutter Street, right near the entrance to the Solano Tunnel. It was and remains quiet there, one of those leafy parts of Berkeley that you can’t really even rent any more, a place you can drive or walk through and admire and that’s really about it. In 1998 things were different to the degree that I could get a piece of North Berkeley for less than $500 per month, and even that was a stretch that tapped me out until the calendar flipped and I got paid again.

Newspapering never paid well. Not then and not now. Even then there was the stench of mortality about it, like a puff of air from a dying man’s bed. Still, I was young and when you are young you have that optimism that you don’t understand at the time, don’t even necessarily know exists amongst the corners of angst that you know all too well. You know them because they don’t let you forget them. They poke you in all the uncomfortable places, cause you to squirm. The discomfort masks all the good stuff.

Those days I commuted from Berkeley to Fairfield, twenty-four k’s per year, the standard benefits and barely any vacation time.