Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 01:33:09 -0700 (PDT)
From: Alan Gullette <alang-AT-creative.net>
Subject: Re: A SHORT WALK


Not feeling like getting out just yet, I followed Stuart's instructions by
taking a "virtual" walk (to defuse an overused term) and wound up in the
Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. A place well-known to me, though arrived at
(virtually) by a new route...

At the bottom of my front step I turn left and head due west down the
sidewalk running along the south side of McAllister Street.  It is always
necessary to keep one eye glued to the pavement, so often littered with dog
offal. Next to the telephone poll at the corner of Lyon there is always an
interesting pile of rubbish: old sofas, chairs, or mattresses, old clothes
and useless trash. Unimpressed by the profferings, I turn left. Past the
place where the guy works on his motorcycle and just before the AIDS hospice
run by Mother Theresa's order, I cross the street, looking back into the
carport where a statue of the Virgin surrounded by fresh flowers is enclosed
by black wrought-iron bars. 
I turn right on Fulton, where I am always eager to see what I can see of the
western sky over the hilltop of St. Ignatius. The sun is caught behind thick
clouds or a lining of fog that swirls swiftly and steadily from the ocean.

The traffic is light but I cross at Central, already constituting a right
turn and taking me along a path I have only taken to retreive my parked truck.

I cross, turn at Grove, turn at Masonic, which I know I will not be able to
cross without the light. Above the street is a paved basketball court closed
in chain-link fence, and the retaining wall has been painted with a detailed
mural of many "peoples of color" (excluding white) apparently coexisting
peacefully, with wistful eyes staring straight at you but peering into the
future. 

Now I turn on Hayes, remembering the time I fell asleep on the 21 Hayes bus
and passed my stop; when I was jolted awake, I jumped up and pulled the
cord, getting out at the next stop but overlooking the fact that my baret
was falling from my lap (yes, even more embarrassing, in retrospect, since
my name is French but I can barely speak it).  So I quickly cross the
street, continue west until Ashberry, where I turn left.  Here there is
nothing distinct before my mind's eye, which feeds on my brain's eyes, which
have never been loosed upon this particular block of my extended neighborhood.  

But I do see, before me, and across Fell, which I now approach, the
Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. All at once the 60s flood before me with its
hordes of unwashed hippies colliding aimlessly with the 90s deadheads with
dreadlocks drumming dronefully near the children's playground.

Now I have arrived somewhere quite nearby my usual haunts but only in
vision, only as a haunt myself, and I wonder where my virtual version of
Stuart's Walk has gotten me -- leading me aleatorically by an unknown path
to a known area now known only because it is already well known.  And I
wonder -- not sure whether to turn left or right, since Ashberry is
disrupted by the park before it reaches past Page to Haight (yes, "the"
Haight) -- and being without a sidewalk or street, or further guidance from
Stuart's nameless map, or meta-map, I wonder, Have I arrived anywhere? Have
I been led to where I am supposed to "be"? 

What is the lesson? To venture past the known to the unknown? But have I
already made that impossible by only travelling virtually, in imagination,
or should this make it easier to leave memory behind?

But far from being lost, I know exactly where I am heading as I curve my
mental steps across the green grasses, between the towering eucalyptus
trees, back up Masonic, crossing at Haight to pass sublimely into the fresh
baked atmosphere of the Holey Bagel, where I can order virtually all the
garlic bialies my nominally Gallic gullet can gulp...
alang-AT-creative.net
http://www.creative.net/~alang