Redrawing The Mental Map

[The weekend will be about moving. Everyone's doing it: Token-Straight-Guy-Dennis last weekend*; he who was the Rocky Mountain Ranger has left the Rockies, having found a pleasant peninsula; and I'm off this weekend to the Panhandle after nine years downtown.]

[I've been finding myself wandering the lower Nob Hill/upper Tenderloin streets lately, noting landmarks and the memories they hold for me. I've been making lists of all the places whose doors I haven't darkened as well. Am I missing something, for example, by never having hit that big Vietnamese family-style joint across the street all these years? I never hear anyone talk about it, but it's always filled with Asian families at tables for fifteen.**]

[It's not going anywhere just because I'm moving, but I know from experience that if you don't have a reason to go to most neighborhoods in this town, they might as well be in another time zone. (My recent trips to the upper Haight reenforced this as well.) I met my new flatmate to deliver the rent check at the new-ish cafe adjacent to the always-hideous Marriott, and noted then how long it had been since I'd walked that stretch of Market Street. Yet the Marriott was, once upon a time, one of the centers of my universe: I aged more than a bit in that lobby waiting for John to get off work back all those times back in the late '90s.]

[So my mental map is about to change again, in the biggest way. Instead of strip joints, I'll have what's become of the Haight-Ashbury to contemplate as I wait for my bus to work. I want finally to get to know Golden Gate Park. I'll see less sunshine, but more greenery. I think that, for a while now, downtown has meant being stuck in habits left over from my relationship, my school career, and some bad behavior that I plan finally to leave behind for good. Moving isn't going to be a cure-all, but I have hopes for this change.]

[*And I helped. Did you know the area around Twelfth Avenue and Taraval Street isn't at all Sunset-ish? One has a tendency to think of any S.F. neighborhood involving numbered avenues as offering only unrelieved, gray sameness, but it isn't really true. Cute area, transit-convenient, and one got the idea that there are relatively affordable living situations to be found.]

[**I've managed to avoid the fairly famous Mitchell Brothers strip club at Polk and O'Farrell, one of two such places that have met my eye every morning as I've waited for the bus to work. I mentioned this to my parents when we passed it as they drove me home a few weeks ago, and my dad, half-asleep in the front, muttered something about how typical it was to fail to visit the cultural amenities in one's own backyard.]

[For a minute, I thought he was semi-coherently slamming me specifically for not taking advantage of San Francisco's cultural institutions (and I do feel just terrible that I haven't visited the "new" Asian Art Museum past which I've rushed to or from school and work for years), and I actually felt bad in response. The power we give loved ones over us, power they never asked for and don't even know they wield. Ridiculous on so many levels.]

[(I've never been to any of the gay strip joints in the neighborhood either, by the way.)]

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