Naked and spectacular

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2013-09-09

I had a nervous breakdown in San Francisco

In a world of love and money, I went crazy in San Francisco.

Golden Gate Park opened up and held me like a womb.  The abundance of Whole Foods fattened my lonely days and emotionally complex and confusing emails from loving friends brought sobbing tears into my nights.  I could smell the eucalyptus all around me in my cave of tree and vine, their fallen leaves and bark were my carpet and they covered my bags when I went out for the day.

The mist fell on me like a veil of death, a gift from the whole planet.  "Thank you for the heavy veil of tech culture," the mist seemed to say, "in return I shroud you in an endless fog that no messiah will save you from."

I searched for love in the best possible place.  A void opened up around my friend and I and we took the opportunity to dance around in that void, failing to anticipate the clutter that had been left there, invisibly.  We yearned for the love that we knew was there, we tasted and smelled that love.  It was sweet, tender, funny, but the void sucked us in, like an enormous vacuum vagina, emotionally inescapable.

There was no way we could dance our way out of this womb.  My great wordsmithing was useless.  We were latched on to an umbilical conduit of anxiety and shame.  I ate the shame, I slept with the shame, I looked at it every time I closed my eyes.

I would visit the San Francisco Public Library every day and disappear into mezzanines of serpents and temptations and false gods walking through gardens and a lost paradise.

I would spread myself via Facebook into little wi-fi rooms all over the planet, through the monitors of people who admire and love me, into their distant hearts.

I would shamefully look over the cliff-face to the lower floors to see desperate angry library patrons yelling at staff or into their phones.  I would see the uniformed security team come up, try to talk to them, grab their arm, grapple and grip against the struggle and escort the unacceptable lunatic out of the building into a different unsafe adventure in the city.

I would stay until the library closed, always too early, and step out into the falling darkness and cold, before the fog rolled in.  I would sneak into the back of the bus, crowded thick with Capitalists, stinking of alcoholic fragrances, the glare of iPhone light, descending towards the ocean, past the park.  I would step off the bus by the rose garden, past the log cabin and into the eucalypts.

Maybe the fog would roll in with me at the rose garden, maybe it would wake me in the night with heavy droplets falling from the leaves far above me.  Already nestled in my sleeping bag, I would pull the blue tarp over my body and tuck it under my sleeping mat.  In my plastic womb I would be warm and safe and dark, to breathe and sleep and dream.

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