San Francisco, CA

I love this city. I couldn’t coherently explain to you why, but I do. It’s some combination of the cold air, the brazen hipsters, the last of the hippies. It’s a comfortable place for me.

This trip, alas, was very brief, barely two days. And yet those two days could not have been more fulfilling for me. I leave the city for what it is. It was friends I came to see. And none more distant from each other, perhaps, than these two.

The one is an unabashed, unashamed, determined author; I believe she shall succeed. For a long time I have been her editor, maybe some sort of inspiration, I don’t know. Yet, I seem to come with a breakthrough gleaned from my critique. I don’t know what I inspire, but it seems to work.

In terms of writing itself, I have learned a great deal over the past year and change. My dialogue is better than anything else, kill your darlings, and ultimately, write, write, write, and keep writing until bloody nubs can barely lift a pen. Then throw out the vast majority of it, and start over again. Everyone has their own style, their own gift. I won’t claim to know what it is, or how to pull it out.

It is a rare person who forces us to think about our own deeply held prejudices, thoughts, beliefs, and who evokes our own change within them. My second friend is one such person. Over the course of a long, wonderful evening, we discussed topics ranging from religion to sex, food to drugs and everything and anything in between.

“I want to wake up every morning excited,” she told me. And I realized, cliché that may sound, truer words were never spoken. I believe in joy as an ineffable right or perhaps, expectation of life. I want to surround myself in and of it, and with people who have that quality as well. Her statement drives at the core of this belief. And I owe her deeply for explaining this to me. Thank you.

Over the course of the weekend, I discovered new beer, wandered Haight St. searching ineffectively for a wallet, found a lighter instead, and learned a great deal about my world and myself.