Borders does not have a "Commodity Aesthetics" section

Since yesterday was my only really free day to explore the city, I set off after checking and re-checking my bank account (there was about a $200 discrepancy between what my company said it was paying for and what it actually paid for. Fun.) Hopefully my math, which I repeated checked on two different calculators, worked out and I don’t run any over draft charges. Eek.

On to my mini-venture…

Apparently, the west coast has a rainy season. It’s lovely in the morning and then the rains set in and normal people take cover under awnings. I pick this time to take a 15 minute walk to Chinatown. Well, it would have been 15 minutes if my shoes did not repeatedly fall off my feet. My lovely, dependable Steve Madden flats that have only ever coyly dropped off my heel while sitting on the Metro, slipped completely off my feet crossing Geary St. San Francisco, you could imagine is about level with D.C. when it comes to “places I’d rather prefer not to be barefoot.” I elected to try and find a shoe store in the area. Chinatown does not have shoe stores. It has Hunan restaurants and a few head shops (how does one city support so many head shops?) and weird Chinese herb shops the likes of which I’ve only seen on travel specials…no shoe stores. I figured out a way to walk with my toes completely flexed so as to create a kind of hook to which my shoes could cling and made my way to City Lights to spend too much money and dry off. (Side note, I’m writing this in a Starbucks and one of the baristas just alerted everyone to a messenger bag left unattended at a table. The barista warned the person who copped to owning the bag that someone could steal it. Everyone else seemed utterly nonplussed. I immediately thought, “don’t touch it, it could be a chemical weapon.” I’ve been living near D.C. too fucking long.)

City Lights was magically. As magical as you’d expect a bookstore owned by one of the Beats to be. The building is old and in the rain smelled vaguely of mildew (booksmell mostly overwhelmed that but not completely.) The poetry room was everything I'd hoped it would be. Unfortunately, upon reaching the room on the third floor I completely forgot the name of every poet or poem I'd ever read and proceeded to wander aimlessly around the room until something popped out at me. I almost left with the collected poems of W.B. Yeats. Then I remembered that, unlike Borders, I may be judged for my book purchasing choices at an (anti)establishment of this magnitude. I picked up a collection by Philip Larkin (not particularly impressive but I love him and own nothing by him yet so I took the risk. Then I frantically flipped through my moleskine for any name that I'd come across but did not own yet. I found Robert Creeley and Dorothea Tanning. I went with the Tanning but later remembered that Mark had mentioned I should look into Albert Goldbarth. I stuck with the Tanning but not without a decent amount of back and worth.

When I finally left (it took a while to work up the reserve to stop smelling the Derrida, I left with one children's book for Kora about a duck who buys ever-expanding purple socks, the Larkin, the Tanning, the latest issue of Believer, Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland, 7 postcards ( a picture of City Lights, Joyce, Whitman, Heaney, Bukowski sticking his fingers in his mouth, the staircase leading up to the Poetry Room, and Ginsburg), and a bumper sticker that says "HOWL if you love City Lights".

Were it not for my shoes actively falling off (requiring an emergency pair of pumas) I would have stayed longer and bought more. As it is, I think I showed an incredible amount of restraint. I want to love San Francisco but there are things I cannot reconcile. The homeless situation here dwarfs D.C. They're really all over. Not pushy or aggressive, but problematic nonetheless. No one walks fast enough. Even in the morning. It's as if they have no where to be, even at 8:45 in the morning. My skin and hair are simultaneously dry and oily. I don't know how that happens, but there it is. This climate does not agree with my face.

Really though, I'm just not cool enough for this place. I'm barely cool enough for D.C.