June Gloom
Brian Wilson is dead,
so is Jimmy Buffet.
Along with any belief I had in the concept of retirement.
The fog bank checks are bouncing particularly hard this June.
The weather man named Dallas Rains says the checks won’t clear because it is a matter of time based latitude.
I want to trade this fog for a bouquet of palms and a driving distant desert with a warm ocean in the background.
I want to be able to see what I will not see coming so as to not let it pass me by.
I do not want to be in debt to fog bank.
I want a jacketless summer that lasts my lifetime.
But here comes Monday and that’s not me, yet.
The third track on The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds is “That’s not me.” I listened to it while my hair was getting tugged by the wicked San Franciscan June wind. The fog was low, replacing the skyline. The song played,
I miss my pad and the places I've known
And every night as I lay there alone, I will dream
…
I once had a dream
So I packed up and split for the city
I soon found out that my lonely life wasn't so pretty
I'm glad I went now I'm that much more sure that we're ready
Chloe sat on the green velvet chair while I sank into the couch. We were discussing the future and the foggy notion that blocks us presently from seeing it clearly. “I still hate the weather,” Chloe said to me as her head fell into her hands. The San Franciscan idiosyncratic summer weather that is. Currently, the city has been welcoming a god awful amount of wind and the need for a proper jacket lately. Mark Twain said something about this.
The night privy to this conversation we watched the Mike Myer’s classic So I Married an Axe Murder. The skyline in sweeping shots of San Francisco lacked a Salesforce tower. It showed those dreamy Victorian apartments supposedly on Telegraph Hill–that even for the time were probably a stretch that a woman who was a butcher could live in, but regardless it seemed to be that idyllic 1990s San Francisco that I have heard about. Where everybody was eccentric and you could really be a writer and get away with it. Rents were more affordable, culture, and transit lines were steadfast.
I came across a video recently that featured a woman predicting that San Francisco is on the up and up when it comes to being a “cool city.” I also saw a video of a guy naming San Francisco one of the ugliest cities, in terms of population not scenery (this is vain, but compared to New York or Los Angeles nobody moves here to become a model to the best of my knowledge). Another video to join these ranks was another woman airing her grievances about people who move to San Francisco and complain about the weather or the style.
In recent months my friends and I have been denied multiple apartments on the basis that there was a more suitable tenant. We are too poor even for the apartments that are in our price range. Maybe being in the minority that does not work for Apple, Google, or any other faceless tech company does in fact obstruct attractive optics of this place. This place, this city is beautiful. It is easy to navigate and even easier to access grass to touch. Uniform architecture and cypress trees help make a foggy dreamy mirage. I get emotional when the sun hits the tree tops and the parrots flock overhead. When the Golden Gate is visible it breaks my heart because of its impermeability. It is beautiful and standing there amidst it all. The wind, the rain, the exodus, the culture shift.
Months ago, I texted my friend Joe, Is there a price tag for your morals? I asked him because when I asked myself I could not land on the solid ground of an answer. I got headhunted on LinkedIn for a marketing position for one of the “fastest growing Tech AI companies” based here in San Francisco. The job would be salaried with the low end totaling over one hundred thousand dollars. It made me think about how my barely over fifty thousand dollar yearly revenue allowed me to pay rent and feed myself. What do you mean there are twenty somethings who are making more money than say a forty something professional? However, mostly this process made me question my morals, how much until I let go of them? The morals being how I view the looming shadow that is artificial intelligence. At my most recent job one of my bosses asked me to write copy for a program description. I wrote, revised, and wrote again. I sent it to her and she told me she put it through ChatGPT and liked that version better. So why ask me in the first place? Regardless, I had four interviews for the position at the ‘fastest growing tech AI company.’ The first was a recruiter and the second with my would be boss. At one point in the interview my potential boss asked me, “Do you consider yourself a smart person?” It was direct and pointed. I answered yes, but frankly did not feel like I believed myself. I think it is because maybe an aspect of my morals is that I will never be the smartest person in the room. Other people know other things and that is the interesting part about life. A full head does not leave room to learn. I get lost in my own verbose explanations and say the word like far too often. I am from Southern California and I sound like it. My ideal day does not involve work, instead it involves sunshine, the ocean, a great meal with good wine, dancing with fun company, and linen bed sheets. I wonder if smart people feel the same kind of emotional well up that washes over me on a beautiful day? He told me, “You are the outlier candidate. Other people we are speaking to have way more experience and work in the sector, but their content is not original.” The interview lasted about an hour and he instructed me to use ChatGPT to learn about inference models so in my next interviews I could offer some informed talking points. He gave me the cheat sheet and told me he does not understand how someone could survive in San Francisco making fifty thousand dollars. I do not know what a single person would do with six figures to themselves except at times having to work eighty hours a week to sell a tech product to tech people that is a digital middleman.
To be young now is to be alive for the crash and burn. It is about holding reverence for everything our parents, our parents’ parents, and so on and so forth got to experience that gets to be idolized. The constant unsettled change I have grown up with is one marked by loss. Natural disasters, tragedies, and cultural figures dying. When I moved to San Francisco, people offered this weird consolation, “the city has changed.” I suppose it is to soften the blow that comes when expectations of a place fall short. What was once was or what used to be was so much better or so I am told. However, there is no going back and the Salesforce Tower will loom in the skyline. The city feels like it will only be harder to exist in (one landlord informed a friend of mine that rent prices are adjusting back to pre-pandemic pricing). But this place is unmoving in some ways. Ocean beach will be windswept, the brick mansions will still look empty, the fog horns will bellow, and the Golden Gate will shine on. It is not all hope is lost, because sometimes there are glimmers of the past that appear, however flimsy they may be. Conversations with strangers when I wander streets alone or that unnamed feeling that arises when the bay peaks through a frame of buildings. It makes me wonder if a relic’s charm can ever get old? Or will the present day politely phase the relic out of town?
I have an odd affinity to the past, maybe an unhealthy borderline obsession. Chloe told a friend of ours on the phone, “Caroline is reliving the past,” which has more to do with my dating life and current affairs, but regardless nostalgia has been a familiar everlong constant. In some ways it is an allergy to change that was initially inflicted by movies starring Cary Grant and radio stations playing the sixties at six. Clinging to the past only guarantees heartbreak, but romance inherently exists in delusion. San Francisco seems to break my heart. It is a beautiful second love that is running out of runway. As the years have fallen on top of each other, whatever was my anchor to this place or that place might be landing someplace else some time soon. I suppose I seem to believe whatever the nameless thing I am trying to find will be told to me by the place in which I find myself. San Francisco revealed to me that a certain kind of beauty can last, but other factors can diminish it (like fifty degree foggy June Days and time). There is a cliché that it is better to have love and lost, than never love at all, which is mainly applied to people not places, but que sera sera or however it is supposed to go. If any of this is making sense or nonsense, all that matters is that I am just really tired of this June Gloom and I keep thinking wouldn’t it be nice if I was in margaritaville right about now.
