Drudgery vs. Insanity

This won't be long. I promise. For one thing, I have to do some work.

The days in Foster City of late have been what I think of as perfect San Francisco days: fog banks like cotton, high grey skies, marine air just cold enough a sweatshirt seems like reasonable wear. Work has been mellow enough I can really focus on the challenges of proofreading, individual odysseys instead of a gauntlet. So of course my mind has time to chew on itself, and of course I'm thinking about San Francisco, and my five years living there.

And I find, in a weird way, I am missing it. It's a lovely place, honestly, full of the kinds of quirky people I really love, full of the sort of wild creative energy and youth I sometimes find my life lacks. But I think, like my homesickness for Santa Cruz (detailed in a far more personal journal), I am not so much homesick for the place as for a perspective on that place.

When I lived in San Francisco I was a grad student and a bookstore clerk, neither of them full-time jobs in the sense of cubicles and offices. I worked hard in both cases (well, as hard as a faltering business allowed), but that hard work came in small bursts—an hour of rushed register work here, a night of thesis-writing there—that left plenty of time for playing, and plenty of energy for it, too. And then when the thesis was done and the monumental accomplishment over, that time I spent on school could be spent on...wait for it...writing.

Something in San Francisco inspired my writing; I was productive there in a way I have trouble being in Mountain View. Of course, on reflection a lot of what I wrote there was also deeply immature—Done with Mirrors is the best thing to have come out of that era of my writing, with "Live from the Serpent Room" perhaps a close second—but there was a sense of freedom there, of exposure to ideas, of experimentation and learning.

My point in all this, which is not as short as I'd hoped, is the deep effect space can have on writing. It's perhaps a trite point, but writing really is a lot about perspective. Something in my Mountain View life injects a doubt into my writing process I did not have before. In some cases, that's good; it keeps me away from some of the more trite plot elements I might introduce, makes me think about my characters more deeply. But doubt it is; and for the time being, "doubt" is the word I will associate with Mountain View, while San Francisco will be connected with "vitality". At least until I spend some time doubting myself in San Francisco.

Speaking of which, I'm house-sitting next week, coincidentally at my old place of residence...let's call it an experiment.