The Bridge

When I was a little kid, my parents lived in San Leandro, my dad's parents lived in Oakland (the very apartment I'm staying in now to be precise), and my mom's parents lived in San Francisco. I spent my fair share of time staring out the back of all of their cars, looking at the Bay Area as it blurred by, and having family on both sides of the Bay meant I spent a lot of time traversing the Bay Bridge.

This morning, on my way to UCSF for my colonoscopy, I felt like I was on the Bay Bridge episode of "This Is Your Life". My grandpa and I left the apartment at 6:30AM this morning to ensure a punctual arrival for my penetration, and like every other trip I take to UCSF, I spent the ride looking at the side of the road behind sunglasses so that I had a hope in hell of hiding how close to sobbing hysteria I was. As we entered the toll plaza, the gloomy grey light in the sky and countless headlights in front of us reminded of all night drives on the East Coast while being on tour with Throwdown. I felt just as tired and stressed out as I did on tour with them certain times, but I was also reminded of how care free and easy life was then. I had a functioning stomach and I didn't feel like some sort of failure as a human being yet. Ignorance was bliss.

I used to live in a warehouse on Tehama St in San Francisco when I first moved to the Bay in 2005. If you were to drive there from the Easy Bay, you took the first exit on the right and basically you were there. In fact, from the huge windows in the front of 58 Tehama which were above the bar in the kitchen, you could see the exit ramp. I had a lot of good times in Tehama. I got to see Big Business, Saviours, Get Hustle, The Starvations, Landmind Marathon, Pelican, FM Bats, Geisha Girls, Backstabbers Inc, and The Holy Kiss all from the comfort of my own home. Tehama was also the greatest built in after party you could have ever imagined, and many a night didn't actually end until well into the next day if you ended up there after a night at the bars. However, good things never last, and it was eventually overran by a russian coke-dealing, Burning Man weirdo. Not that I have any ill will towards that guy, but it was the end of a good time.

As we made our way through the city, we crossed Fell and Divisdero, which is about a block from where Kindle lives, or at least used to live because I haven't talked to him in a few months. At 7AM, the sky was already pretty light, but it wasn't too much lighter than the many times I would stagger and stumble out of his apartment and up Divisdero to Haight St where I would wait in the freezing cold for the N Judah Owl bus to show up. The great thing about the N Judah Owl bus is that it follows absolutely no schedule what so ever, so taking it in any regard, whether is was out of your mind wasted at 6am to get back home to the Sunset, or at 1:45AM from 47th Ave and Judah so you could get to Whole Foods Market Franklin at 4AM to get the store opened before the 6AM all store meeting. The N Judah Owl bus doesn't care if your motives are pure and righteous or juvenile and stupid. It was the great equalizer. No matter what your plans were, it made you suffer nonetheless.

After my procedure my grandpa took me out for a late breakfast at Toast on 24th St. We headed back towards the freeway down 24th St to Valencia, then to Duboce, and to the freeway. The memories of this part of the route are really too much to talk about right now, but nothing like familar street signs, corners, restaurants, sidewalks, and graffiti tags to set your mind going on why you just couldn't cut it as what you needed to be.

As we got back onto the Bridge, I barely kept it together. Back when I was four, and I was getting driven home from my grandparents house to my parent's in San Leandro, I used to look up at the steel rafters that hang down above the cars on the lower deck and be reminded of the ravoli my parents and grandparents would feed me from the Lakeshore Deli in Oakland. Being a rather cunning little shit head as a child, I would often attempt to manipulate whatever dinner plans were in order to include these ravioli as we passed them on the way home. Today the lower deck looked much different. It looked like a part of a scene built for one of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. The steel beams that cross on the side looked like bone. The view of the entire expansion of the bridge was like some gnarled, fucked up spinal cord that had been beaten and twisted one too many times. On the Oakland side of the bridge past the Treasure Island tunnel, the red rust smeared at random on all of the steel was my blood. Blood I left on the operating table at Long Hospital 103 at the UCSF campus. Blood I left all over a small room of an apartment on 20th St. Blood I left on 47th Ave and Judah. Blood I left on 36th Ave and Anza. Blood I left at 58 Tehama St. Blood I left on sleeves, tissues, paper towels, straws, barstools, pool tables, sidewalks, and faces of the last five years of my adult life in the Bay Area.

I don't feel hopefully or confident about today's test. The only difference today's procedure had from any previous operation I've had since getting sick was that I at certain times, I was awake enough to try and have a conversation with the doctor and nurses at certain points, but they would just look back at me and say nothing. I knew what I was trying to say, and I was trying to say pleasant and helpful things, but I'm sure that the words themselves sounded like gibberish from a raving mad man, which warranted their "shhhs" and their gentle hands pushing me back towards the drooled on pillow at the head of my gurney. Before drifting off into another sedation intensified slumber, and laughed to myself and thought "wow, I've never lived through something so metaphorically related to how I feel about my own life before".