San Francisco: Some Final Scattered Thoughts
It feels sort of stupid to write about San Francisco, a city so many of my friends know so much more about. I think it’s beautiful there — it was a nice reprieve from New York. The Irish blood in me loves even the gloomy weather. The food, I will insist again, is certainly not superior to the food in New York — or perhaps not even in LA — but I had a pretty astoundingly delicious short rib dish at The House of Nanking, which I will probably remember forever.
I’m most happiest when I’m somewhere new — boredom dissipates, and I get exhausted easily. More than even discovering new things, I like the bone deep tired that sets in when I return to my hotel room. I love settling into a clean bed after a bath, and stealing some time to read.
The absolute best thing about San Francisco, I think, is the ocean. In New York, the ocean is a sort of tame beast — even during Sandy, it seeped rather than gushed. But in San Francisco, it is terrifying. On our last morning, Caleb rented a car and drove me to Fort Point, where we climbed to the roof, and stood underneath the Golden Gate Bride.
I’m sort of inured to bridges, having spent so much time going over them in New York — it was the ocean that awed me. The roar and magnitude of the waves — the desolate coast. The sense that if you fell in, you’d be immediately crushed. I just wrote like 4 other sentences about all of this, but who really wants to read another shitty description of an ocean?
In New York, I looked out the window on the stretch of the BQE that I think holds the most gorgeous view of Manhattan from the boroughs — the stretch that extends from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Statue of Liberty, and encompasses the tip of the island. It looked sort of worn and paltry, after San Francisco. The sparkling office towers looked white instead of gold.
Rather than writing more flowery nonsense, I’m following the lead of photographer Jamie Beck, whose blog I absolutely love. She takes such astoundingly gorgeous photographs, and she herself is really beautiful; I’m unsure why she’s not as famous as Beyonce. On her site, she writes a small text, and then fills her posts with photographs. I follow her lead…
