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I Had Every Intention

…this evening of going out and doing some night photography. I even got the camera and tripod out. Then I looked at the temperature and the wind chill and said, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!”

Oh well. Maybe this summer.

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This Does Not Surprise Me


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San Francisco has always—or at least for the last three decades—been an extremely expensive place to live. Yes, the wages are correspondingly higher in most careers in the Bay Area, but I still suffered no small amount of culture shock when I relocated there in 1986 and ended up spending twice what I’d been paying in Tucson for less square footage. Still, newly drunk on the fact that we were in fact actually living in San Francisco, we laughed at the $300 sweaters at Macys and often joked, “Who would pay $2700 for an apartment, even if it was on Russian Hill?” I guess now that figure is the going average for even the less desirable areas of town.

When I left the City in 2002, I was paying $1300 a month for a one bedroom apartment in a rent-controlled 50s-era building on Upper Market. Even then I thought it was a ridiculous amount to pay to live in a building where the elevator had been out of service going on six months. (The owner was Diane Feinstein’s next door neighbor, so there was no lack of funds to get it fixed.)

Of course, Ben and I are now paying more than that for a 2 bedroom place in Denver. How times change.

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On the Subject Of Everyone Bitching About Battery Life

It seems that every time Apple updates its iOS, People With Very Important Opinions© start bitching about how iPhone battery life has taken a nosedive. I have to laugh because none of these very important people seem to realize that when a new OS comes out, people initially use their phones more to explore the new OS.

So of course your battery life is going to go down!

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Dreams of Home

Last night I dreamt my sister and I were back in the house where we lived during my high school and college years. I don’t remember the circumstances, only the overwhelming feeling of “home” and “safety” that it elicited. I remember standing in my bedroom, running a finger down the blinds, watching the afternoon sun stream in. It was a little slice of heaven.

Dig those bell bottoms!

That poor bedroom received more coats of paint that I can count over the years. Sadly, I don’t have photos from all its iterations. I think the blue phase was my favorite, even though it never was the exact blue I’d envisioned. I also forever regretted my choice of carpet when we first moved in because it never went with anything; a brown, white, and black shag that my father reluctantly agreed to on the condition there would be no more “girly” colors (lemon yellow, lime green—hey, it was the late 60s and early 70s!) like I’d had in my bedroom in our previous home.

My mom, being an interior decorator, indulged my nervous color twitching and I think on some level encouraged it.

My “peach” phase, and the color of the room that most often appears in my dreams

I’ve dreamt of that house more often than usual over the past few years, and I’m starting to think that while my last apartment in Phoenix may be my current conscious mental “happy place” where I go to de-stress and cocoon, that house on Solano Drive North may in fact be my real, subconscious place of refuge.

The chocolate experiment
What I wouldn’t give to still have that original Hildebrant STAR WARS poster that I picked up for $3 at Spencer’s Gifts shortly after the movie came out…not to mention the Donna Summer!
Yes, that’s a collage of mens…
Always the stereo geek. Funny how I don’t keep house plants any more; I used to surround myself with them.
The chocolate walls lasted about 6 months before they closed in and I was convinced I was seeing things moving in the shadows. It was time for them to go.
Disco, baby. Disco.
A little bit of that afternoon glow streaming in that so often appears in my dreams of this house.
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Scenes from San Francisco, 1993

I still find it amazing that for all the years I lived in San Francisco—inarguably one the most photogenic cities in the United States—I have so few photos of The City itself. Again and again I used to say, “I really need to grab my camera and just start walking the neighborhoods,” but like going to the Monterey Bay Aquarium—something else that kept getting put off “because it’ll always be there”—one day I woke up and realized I no longer had the opportunity.

But every so often I did get out…

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The AIDS Memorial Quilt, 1988

Going through more photos…

Even though I’d been in San Francisco a couple years when the quilt was unveiled at Moscone Center in December of 1988, I was still semi-insulated from the ravages of the AIDS epidemic, having lost only two friends to the disease: Kent “Red” Kelly (who’d moved from Phoenix to San Francisco in 1979 and remarked shortly before his death in 1987 that, “Six years in San Francisco are better than sixty in Arizona,” and Ben Walzer, a dear friend and “neighbor with benefits” from my time in Tucson who passed only a few days after Kent.

But like happened with so many others, the arrival of the horrible 90s changed all that.