Saturday, October 17, 2020

THE LAST BLACK MAN
IN SAN FRANCISCO

We went cycling at East Coast Park today. It's a long stretch of beach from the airport to wherever the heck it stretches to, and it was nice to see, people in their safe groups of five. Parents were teaching their kids to rollerblade, the sun was not too hot as it was past four in the afternoon. It felt lovely, to see pockets of friends enjoying water activities, families rejoicing in raucous laughter. 

I was having a lot of fun, until my left elbow hurt, and I wondered whether it's because I have hyperextended elbows. I don't actually know what that means or entails. Ben told me we both had hyperextended elbows before, and you know me, I thought, oh this guy cycles and snowboards and he knows his body (and mine, and I'm not exaggerating) very well, so if he says I have hyperextended elbows, I have hyperextended elbows, whatever that means. I suppose I have better awareness of my own body since I met him ---- aaaah, that's another chapter for another day. Anyway, my elbow hurt the second hour of cycling is all there was to that. I won't have a bicycle in Vancouver (although I might get a skateboard) so I need to squeeze in all the cycling I can get here. Sometimes, when I spend time in nature, breathing in the breeze, I think, the world is okay. This pocket of time in this pocket of space is okay. Then I swam in the evening, and I did many continuous laps and I love swimming, so that was another pocket of time that made today great. 

I recently watched The Dawn Wall, about these two men who free climb The Dawn Wall, a relatively smooth surface of El Capitan at Yosemite. I'd wanted to go back to climbing classes but my friend Sarah from lululemon went bouldering in a gym last week, landed poorly back onto the ground, and she had a slipped disc or something or the other in her spine, and she had to be hospitalized!!!!!!!! So that makes me wonder if I really want to learn to skate in Vancouver. If I fell and scraped my knees that's fine, but if I have to get hospitalized by myself in another country, I WILL LOSE MY SHIT. Anyway, what I wanted to say was I've been to Yosemite before, but it was in the dead of winter and it was covered in snow, like the Mac OS default desktop once upon a time, and I definitely wanna see it again in spring. One day. One day. Before the world ends.

We watched Feels Good Man tonight, it's about Pepe the Frog and how it snowballed from being a general meme all the way into being an alt-right symbol and listed as a hate symbol, like a swastika, by the Anti-Defamation League or whatever. Bro, that really got out of hand and I feel terrible for the creator, he's such a hippie-type person, who like, needs therapy. Matt Furie says this world is a garbage world, which is completely legit. I hope Trump doesn't win again. The film ends well because Hong Kongers co-opted Pepe to be their symbol for freedom in their protests against authoritarianism, so that's some good shit man. It was a good Saturday and it feels good, man.