15

Seems to be a week for annual celebrations, huh?

In exactly two hours, seventeen minutes from......Mark! it will be exactly fifteen years that I've been a San Francisco Actual: several years before I had an address here I was of it. Hokey? Yes. True? Absolutely.

I have dreamt of many things, and to say that most didn't come true comes with no disappointment. Why? Because life in San Francisco obviates concrete expectation in favor of the Possible.

It's like making new friends unexpectedly (something I have recent and wonderful experience with) as opposed to sticking with your own contacts list. It's also like being a software developer: you give your users what they want, but how do you give them what they don't even know to ask for?

Enough possibilities and the world is indistinguishable from infinite from within a finite life. Of course there are good and bad points to that, and no one in the path of a rush of possibilities can remain intact and in-place without some serious mental effort to continue to exist. “Too many” possibilities and you never commit to anything. “Too few”, and you never venture out into the world.

I used scare-quotes because there are no fixed thresholds for too-many and too-few. It all depends on the talents and constitution of any given person.

Someone afraid to commit to anything or anyone fully will hit too-many quite soon. There are some who must possess and exploit the world of the possibles simultaneously by trying to have their cake (the comfort and security of a personal relationship, for example) and eat it, too (“open” the relationship instead of ending it). The math doesn't hold for such: the non-zero game of the infinite gets bastardized into a zero-sum game here. In other words, straddle the paradox and you inevitably must steal energy from others to maintain a foot in both.

San Francisco is magical. Simply that. I thought so before I moved here; I thought so while visiting on the myriad business trips I pilfered from others while living in the Western Burbs of Chicago; I thought so that first magical morning I woke up here in my own house back in 1993.

So many simultaneities, so many moments. So many cross-linkages (S=S) and so many capricious meet-ups. White! A blank page or canvas: So many possibilities.

Still torrid after 15 years.