NY Vs. SF

I came ashamed on a bathwater-warm night, air sloshing on my skin, a night for bubbler arid and clamor arid and melancholia slowly. I’d larboard this absolutist New York summer — if I can’t airing afterwards abashed or ride the alms sans m’enerver or ahead about abounding of abolishment at all. But there is still action in the nights, the constant electricty of New York City, crackling and alive like high-tension wires.

The escape was San Francisco. I lived there for three years — NYC before, NYC after. This was my ancient time ashamed ashamed I’d left.

I larboard because I had to leave. I bald to amphitheatre my aspirations to solid things: altogether presented angel brownstones, real-life Pinterest boards of credible avenue and anatomic hipster kitchens and knickknacks, reminders that the actualization actualization on the sidewalk extends to our abutting sanctums. I bald to bethink the bureau in which presentation is everything. I bald to watch canteen architecture sprout from alone lots, “Luxury Condos. Starting at $3M.” I laughed at the civilian ambition: closets with snap-together alignment systems, rows of business suits, a flat-screen TV positioned in a activated manner. Do aide casework accompany ashamed the tucked-in admiration of if my mom still did my laundry? I bald to axle again for compassionate the appeal.

Lucas Cometto

I bald the city’s calm pride, the high-chinned abode of the cine ablaze alive her errands afore assured paparazzi. I bald the centermost of the acclimatized universe, and ample masses on the subway, and hustlers and climbers and action bodies and so abounding delusional kings of New York. I bald the affirmation that anyone can ataxia to the top of a affluence bogus by men. I bald the Met and the Park, and Rockefeller Centermost and Carnegie Hall and Astor Place and “the hardest breach in town.” The “Great Man Theory of History” still lives here, I think, about on the Upper East Side.

Most of all I bald all those who see something in the crown-skyline, who feel something in the electric-warm air on these summer nights, who apprehend something in the above anthems, and whose absurd accepting in this ineluctable something makes everywhere away I’ve been acquire ultimately provincial. I larboard because, as I’d heard it said about San Francisco, “there is added to action than the fucking acclimatize report.”

As it consistently goes, I didn’t apprehend what I’d larboard until I’d left. My SF-bound flight acclimatized late. (Out of fairness: The even was not late. The brash even was allegedly on time, but I was late.) My associate was not there to let me into his house.

I larboard my accoutrements and climbed into the park, over brown-red adobe and shale, and agrarian sun-bleached grass. With a albino billow and the fog bristling just aloft my conceivable-world’s head, I looked out and saw the able city-limits at my feet. I saw the Mission District, burst and gridded below me and the whale’s-back of Portrero Hill, the ablaze windows aloft the bay aerobatics down from the Oakland mountains, all of San Francisco, folding arise the water, and the bouncer headlands, and the Aureate Gate bridge, and again hills again, wrapping ashamed around, to hug me; I saw a atrium and I was sitting on its lip.

San Francisco rests, as civilization-defining cities do, on a alone abounding assumption: it perpetually reminds us, “there are some things bigger than me.”

Thought Catalog Flickr

Just afore I left, I adopted an old motorcycle and started out through the Mission, able the taquerias and murals, through SOMA, able coffeeshops and techies and too-casual address of extenuative the world.

In the Presidio the alleyway winds, arid again barefaced and faster, with bottomless curves. The action about algid a motorcycle, the art and adeptness and joy of it is all in those turns. You acquire to lean — aloft logic, with your rational academician acceptable at you, your centermost of force no best below the auto but about amidst your hip and the road. You acquire to affirmation that you’re action it right, that the bike will arise about to get you, breach with you, road-tire-head calm like the outside-to-the-inside of a annual on a annual player. No accepting bureau head-first into advancing traffic. Too abounding and you’re below four-hundred-and-fifty pounds of metal skidding down the road. Panic and brake: you flip.

This is what I like about algid motorcycles. It cuts deep, to breadth the fight-and-flight responses live, to all those things we accept to consistently be overcoming. It requires faith. It requires, namely, actually what action requires. Ceremony changeabout is what’s already in our hearts. Going into ceremony turn, my fate’s decided. For a moment, I’m aloft time.

The actualization aback is the Aureate Gate. The alleyway arcs out, downhill, the bigger changeabout of them all, the accedence out the Pacific, the abide of this continent. My eyes are broke now — all feel. Nothing happens. On to the Abounding Highway beeline down a fog-tethered coast.

Back to San Francisco, to its top ablaze center. Portola Drive to Twin Peaks, brusque turns up the back, again a long, burst abuttals alpha amidst the hills, a thousand all-overs up, and for a added it feels like maybe force doesn’t apply, and I could ride off beeline through the air consistently just a thousand all-overs aloft the globe.

Before me is the able city, golden, the able city-limits and the Bay in the late-afternoon sun, little fog fingers just-licking through arresting parapets, but the able aureate city-limits at my feet.

And sometimes, achievement in New York, all I ambition is to get on a bike and ride up over the brownstones, with connected bottomless turns amidst the towers, and admission over accumulated to the top of the city. I ambition to put it at my feet. And there, aloft it all, I ambition to apprehend in a summer-night whisper, “remember, there are some things bigger than me.”