White, Pink and Blue
Having arrived in San Francisco not long ago I sat in a diner and wrote about my first impressions.
The first thing I noticed when I got off the BART train downtown was that SF reeks. Second, the homeless problem is massive, and third it’s a far subtler city than New York, London or Paris. The population here is mostly white, asian and hispanic, and according to my friend D with whom I am staying, the black community is moving out. I also noticed the weather. Mark Twain did not say ‘the coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco’, but this oft quoted cliche is making sense to me; San Francisco weather changes every ten minutes, is different in different parts of the city and is lorded over by what I can only describe as a phantom mist which visibly rolls in every evening. There are many hills, most of them packed with pastel coloured houses and overhung with an ugly but necessary system of wires that powers the streetcar. If you’ve ever been here then nothing I’m saying is new to you, and if you haven’t you can find this out from any guidebook. But I deliberately didn’t look the city up before I got here because a) I would not have been able to resist making an itinerary and b) itineraries = rigidity. Nothing worse than knowing what you’ve missed. Nothing better than finding something you didn’t know about before. Saving the poetry aspect of this post until last: I intend to go about this guest spot the same way I go about writing poems. First, to gather info and second, to lie, borrow and steal until something comes together. It’s tempting to say that I will meticulously plan everything and that I know where I’m heading, but because you’re all writers too you’d know I was lying.
