Downtown
Berkeley does not lend itself well to noir. It doesn’t understand subtlety. It
doesn’t know nuance. It wears itself on its incense-singed sleeve, letting it
all hang out the way that this city does both so well and so terribly. I should
know. I’ve been here more than two decades, and either this place has gotten
more extreme or I’ve become less so, and in either case I’ve been wondering if
a split-up is imminent.
“Hey,”
some dude says, and I cringe out of reflex. I’ve already been having a tough
day. Jeremy hasn’t been returning my texts and I know damn well he’s been
reading them. I mean, it says it
right there on the phone. READ 1:46 p.m. READ 2 p.m. Technology is the worst
tattletale out there. You can’t hide anything anymore because we’ve made it
impossible.
The
guy is relatively clean-cut for someone sitting on the sidewalk, and I have to
wonder if he is even a part of the typical path of human debris that lines
Shattuck Avenue on a more-than-regular basis. Maybe he’s just a student trying
to experience Real Life by immersing himself in urine-scented concrete. Maybe
he’s a tourist checking his iPhone for a likely Airbnb. Maybe he’s just an
observer, and God knows there’s plenty of those here. Maybe, but as it turns
out, he’s exactly what I thought he might be.
Berkeley,
will you please surprise me from time to time?
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