I took last week off because I had a birthday. I expect a few of you noticed. I was hoping to encounter something worth writing about during my hiatus, and I only halfway did, but I suppose it's better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
Most things are.
So, this birthday. My house is the cleanest it's been since...probably sometime in 2020. No one's been here! Well, very few people, anyway. But I was determined to have at least some semblance of a celebration this year, come Hell, high water, or germs, so I had two (TWO!) people over. Two people who were not my parents who obviously are people but it's just different when you're related, m'kay? One person (BFF-Since-We-Were-Three, if you care,) showed up early and we went into San Francisco (!) on BART (!!) to pay Japantown a visit. I did not think this through very carefully. If you're not aware, flowering cherries and plums go cuckoo bananapants this time of year and in Japan they have a whole set of traditions around it--Sakura season. Well, it turned out that there was a festival going on in Peace Plaza so there were far more people there than was ideal, but they had sanitizer stations everywhere and I feel like there were more people wearing masks than not, but it was kind of hard to tell because a lot of people were eating because hello, cultural festival food. Anyway, we hit up the one store we had actually made the trek for, grabbed boba, and headed back down the hill.
That was another thing I hadn't thought about. "It's only just over a mile from the BART station, we can walk!" But San Francisco has hills. I celebrated part of my birthday with an unintentional hike. My shins are still pissed off.
The third thing I hadn't thought about was the fact that the route that took us up the hill was straight up Hyde Street, which is on the border of the Tenderloin District which is not somewhere I would want to be alone. Thankfully it was broad daylight and there were community-policing-type persons around in great numbers, so it wasn't so much nerve-wracking as...sad. Really fucking sad. Check-your-privilege sad. The sidewalks were lined with homeless people. There were addicts casually lighting up their crack pipes. One person had a syringe sticking out of their arm. Everywhere you looked there was some new horror. Open wounds. People who clearly needed mental health attention. Did-that-come-out-of-a-dog-or-a-person. Shells of what had once been human beings, staring into nothingness.
It made me want a shower. And if it made me want a shower just walking through it, imagine how the people living in it must feel.
Did that sound awful? Here's some people who help, and have been helping the Tenderloin community for nearly sixty years: GLIDE If you've got a few dollars lying around, maybe push them their way. I did.
After the wake-up call, however, the rest of the day was really very pleasant. When BFFSWWT and I got back to my place my pal PV joined us and we had food and cake (made by BFF... because she is a Kitchen Witch) and forced PV to watch The Birdcage because it is my and BFF's strongly held belief that everyone should see that film at least once.
PV wasn't even BORN when that film came out.
Happy birthday, I'm old.
No comments:
Post a Comment