|
|
They say
if you survived the 90's
In the Mission District in San Francisco You weren't really there. Kyle and I both lived, though. Or at least
did some time at The Daily Plan-It. A cheap rent storefront, punk rock at the bottom of Valencia Street. Neighbors from The Projects knocked on the door to offer us things they had stolen. Norteños
brought green bud and talked about offin' da pigs. The roommates' band played live in the storefront window to whoever wandered
by whenever. We look back now. We were free.
Just because we lived in a store
Does not mean we were for sale.
Time was different then, no computers or phones but this is not meant to be romantic. This déjà vu of
rooms without windows sunless days, fluorescent lit. Nights like the basement of Mission Station.
A kind of no–time time prevailed. Time measured in shots and spoons. My roommate on meth obsessively cleaning his
gun waiting for the revolution or a private apocalypse. Someday, he would stay awake for centuries as time slowed to a crawl
and the fluorescent sun hummed. Alive in each moment, the tiniest seeds of an eternity, cleaning, waiting as decades slowed
to a crawl and nothing came.
Yes it was over so fast the ruins of that time still walk and talk, though, trapped
as they are. In that curious amber The California sun, if you look you can see every pore, every mark. They shake your hand
and remember when and smile in the sun, that timeless sun that falls all around gentle and slow, like an endless river. flowing
always back to 16th and Mission
Because in the mission everything comes back. I believe in reincarnation. If there
was any justice the storefront today would be a pot club. Hey green stinking field. A Holocaust Museum. But it's just a café
with weak coffee and fluorescent lights
Yet there is a kind of hauntology here in these streets that can still
promise. An open-door scum labyrinth in these SOMA dot com alleys where once a long lost creative class worked late every
night to develop and popularize techniques of anal fist fuck like the kind you buy now online at kink.com which fills up the
castle A couple dark streets and decades away from our old storefront window where passersby once saw something they wanted
and they would buy the whole city trying to get it.
What the Spanish
missionaries called The Lake of Sorrows is today filled in. Dolores Park... free Wi-Fi in the sun... the new missionaries
have it all. They point-and-click and drugs are brought to their door by freaks on bikes. It's all green. Point-and-click
and my friends get out of bed and go to work In rooms without windows following the script. dominance and submission. following
orders at kink.com where they say Mission Creek still flows down in the basement. The same way that time still slows to a
crawl in the fluorescent hum and, Alive in each moment, trace the contours, a bare glimpse. This choreography of a chilly
eternal return traced here, in these drawings of images of sex from videos of sex, as watched on a computer screen.
As a lifelong criminal I know how these decisions are made yet it still fascinates. There is enough loneliness out
there-- The credit cards in the night that write the script and pay on demand. And as I reflect on all of these melancholic
transactions I wonder if this, the insatiable demand of this timeless loneliness, is the true subject of this book.
~Erik Lyle 2014
|
|
|
