(un)fog

It's me! The mayor of San Francisco! Go out and vote today, citizens! Go ride a cable car! Go to the wharf and comically fall into the water after comically chasing a seagull (who comically took a crap on your comically large head). Go go go listen to Ginsberg howl at City Lights and definitely go listen to Jesse rip with the Rippers down at the Smash Club. Then you have the Giants and the Golden Gate and the Ghirardelli. You have the soccer games on Saturdays and the brunch with babes in cool shades who order on the rocks while seals by the harbor lounge on rocks. You have the townhomes and the out-of-towners with no home, but they find a home on the streets that go straight up into the fog that doesn't lift for what seems like an eternity until suddenly it does and then it seems like it never existed. Make it to the top of Haight-Ashbury and share a joint with the British boys dressed impeccably well. Their sunglasses and slicked back hair and I-don't-care attitude contrast beautifully with the woman over there who may or may not be on acid, standing on a crate creating visions out of the patches of clouds. There are patterns, there are gates opening to gardens, there are rocks in memorial parks that read "Norman was here" and maybe he was. Maybe he howled and lifted his own fog before settling down underneath this cypress tree. Norman continues on even when he stops. We don't stop, though, because we still have to get lost. The shops are steaming and the scents wake up your stomach. Your eyes wake up, too, if you want them to. And now your brain has been retrained, it has been set free from its own Alcatraz, it washes up on a shore and is snatched up by a kid with a collection. We end up in corners, we end up in pockets, we end up in palms. We end up beginning to give up whatever blocks out the sun, a constant purging of the mind-poison so to speak. So speak up. Stand up on your crate or your cable car or the tips of the branches of your cypress tree and find your voice, your path, your baptism in your howl.