7.24.2026 - Lateral Shaking
Michigan under red sky and ash. Primary races with international consequences et cetera. Mostly I think about squishy grass between the toes on a summer morning, when it’s still cool in the shade. Ineffectual resistance on my part. A survivor's desire to reject politicization of every single goddamn thought. There's this guy from the Detroit suburbs I keep hearing about, someone I will eventually have to meet. He golfs for fun and tells racist jokes and threatens his wife with infidelity. Naturally I heap everything I hate on his block-shaped skull. I wish upon him explosive diarrhea from eating unwashed lettuce, or being set upon by the Dog Man or mangled in an accident on I-75 that was his fault for driving too fast while placing crypto bets on his phone, his brain rearranged so the speech areas are crunched together and impacted so when he wants to call someone a slur it comes out as words for snow. His Sikh neurologist realizes what’s going on and risks his license to delete his findings and this lump of a human being goes back to his shitty middle management job and shittier marriage a shrunken and embarrassed version of his Fred Flintstonian self. I never said my fantasies were full of grace.
When I think about the reasons I gave myself and others for leaving when I did it’s hard to come up with anything honest beyond I was trying to save my own skin, and I was, and I still am, and it’s no accident that I write this from an interior bedroom in an old Edwardian house likely rebuilt circa 1910 out of redwood to cushion the impact future earthquakes which, incidentally, we’re overdue for. Of the few small temblors I’ve experienced I’ve never really felt the ground shake like it does in the movies so I went over to the California Academy of Sciences in the park where they have a simulator for the uninitiated. You follow a few other patrons, mostly kids, through a rope line and into a room with wooden floors and glass displays housing seismology books and another with some blue lace dinnerware among a mural of the city seen from an unknown viewpoint, a credible recreation of a turn of the century home plus grab-bars like you see in bath tubs or elevators.
The first simulation is from October 1989, the one that happened during the World Series and cracked Candlestick Park in half right down the line from home plate to center field or that’s how I remember it anyway. The floor shakes irregularly. Some oohs and aahs. The next one is the 1906 which resulted in something like 30,000 houses burning to the ground and was by all accounts the real cataclysm that defined the city, like the 1871 fire in Chicago, and the simulation only lasts for a fraction of how long it actually went on but you can tell it was as the earthquake scientists say a real fuckin’ doozy.
The Spanish word is terremoto which sounds pretty Japanese if we're being honest with ourselves.
San Francisco is a city in perpetual sunset and I don’t deny how lucky I am to have found a room to rent from a friend of friends who’s become my friend and whose dog tolerates me in exchange for having treats coerced out of my hand. A pair of big black crows commissioned in the park down the street was graffitied by some taggers with white paint, probably the same assholes who painted Cervantes’ eyes red in the statue by the DeYoung museum with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza kneeling before it in full armor, which is funny if you think about it, this whole scene, the notion that these fictional characters know they’re in debt to the author who created them and are somehow still alive, being imaginary, and awestruck enough to pay him homage and even grieve for him as they live out their immortal lives in his stories every time an AP Spanish student cracks an overused marked up volume of his book.
I wasn't above some casual vandalism in my day but the pathology required to deface a work of public art eludes me. What's the message here man? The splotches kind of resembled bird shit on asphalt, which is keeping in theme or in the boundaries of a visual aesthetic of kinds, and maybe to be a real artist you have to be willing to shit all over anything that's sacred, even art or especially art, and you have to be willing to say shocking things at parties like 'all writers are perverts', or stand outside a restaurant in French Canadia after a hip hop concert and get a bunch of Quebecois folks and a couple from Vermont to join you in singing Celtic ballads for the joy and absurdity of it and I'm glad I did that.