I did get to San Francisco this morning and walked through the city paralleling the Embarcadero along the wharf. I stopped short of Fisherman's Wharf somewhere near Fog City Diner and then doubled back through North Beach. Managed to shoot a roll of film. Back to the apartment by 4:00, sore feet, sore back and ready to, um, read a book. In bed. Soon.

I walked through an area near my old office in the Kaiser building on Washington Street following a path that led through two, then three small parks with cherry trees in bloom. There were apartment buildings and condominiums overlooking these small enclaves and I realized I was in an area where apartment rents equalled or exceeded my gross income.

On California I passed the Tadich Grill. I once worked just around the corner on Sansome Street, my first job in San Francisco, and I debated going in and having lunch. A group of maybe eight people were coming out the entrance and one of the women was saying to her companions in a well modulated snotty voice meant to be overheard that Tadich was filled with tourists (and they couldn't get a table). Attractive people in their thirties and early forties, dressed expensively and well. Too old to be making stupid remarks, I thought, but what the hell.

What was the, not discomfort, but pressure I was feeling walking through? The slick aluminum sides of the Fog City Diner, the runners along the Embarcadero in their accessorized running suits? I'm visualizing a way to live, I guess, one that I know a little bit about (which means I know nothing about) and I'm reacting like I'm dreaming on a fever ward, wrestling with memories or maybe something else that makes me look at these surroundings, at the well scrubbed well labeled healthy crowd and thinking wow would I not not not like to be in their shoes. Nothing to do with them, of course, this isn't some stupid comment like that woman's tourist lament, this is some stupid comment about something I've picked up, a kind of irrational rash that develops when I'm around a certain brand of the slick and successful.

It reminds me of my earlier years in San Francisco when I worked with a group of Stanford Business School graduates who were setting out to conquer the world. They were focused and bright and played by the book and they made me nervous, a kind of ferocity of purpose that allowed them to thrive in an atmosphere that I very much needed to escape. Maybe it took me too long to move along and find my own venue and it scrambled my nerves, sending up the occasional shiver when I brush against that world.