A Hard Bed to Sleep on

There’s a place in downtown San Francisco at Market and Sixth that rents live/work lofts designed for artists. They have a kitchenette, shared bathrooms, fresh paint jobs, friendly staff, great location, high ceilings, cheap rates, and no furniture. So this night, my first night in a place of my own in over six months, I will be sleeping on a folded up cardboard box and a bath towel. If you, my faithful reader, could do me a favor and ask all your friends to close their eyes and focus real hard on a mattress appearing at Market and Sixth, I’d really appreciate it. That’s Market and Sixth.

* * *

I got off the phone with David. He’s in paradise. That is Hawaii. And he tells me about the mountain hikes and the morning dips in the beaches and the six shades of blue in the sea and the breezes on warm days in the valleys and the beautiful girls who wear bikinis to summer class. And I tell him about the homeless guys outside and the trannies and the free wifi and the screaming fire engines. And I begin to split right down the middle.
Nathan A:
I drift back like a fog over Sokcho and the jagged rock teeth in the emerald sea on the east coast of South Korea, back to the dusty highland motorcycles in Central Vietnam, back to dirty towns with dirty roads and dirty feet. I don’t give a damn about free wifi or downtown lofts or soft mattresses or graphic design or internships or the future or any of it. Give me a quiet alley in a distant country. Give me surprise, give me the simple things like morning frost and child laughter and the sound of snow melting in the forest.

Nathan B:
I move in to a new territory. Unknown, unmapped. Take me far from my comfort, let me find comfort anew. Embrace risk, move towards the future, step boldly. The world is now. Can be what you make of it. I can be more, see more, do more. The country is the key, but the city is the door. And elsewhere, the room.

* * *

There was a fear I had as a child that the everything would overlook me. That I did not belong in the everything. That the everything operated in bigger places, among bigger people, in other rooms, behind closed doors. It was this childhood fear that emboldened me, when I got lost time and again, when I was afraid of something strange, when I was lonely in a foreign country, when I first stood embarrassed before a classroom of Korean kids. It emboldened me to seek the everything in anything. To peer into the cracks of existence, into death and fear and shame and even joy. Until finally I began to believe what I had always known, that I cannot be apart from the everything. I am always a part of the everything, though I cannot always remember how. Now that I am, what is there that I could want that I do not already have? What is there I could be, that I not already am? You see? Surfaces change, locations change, but I already am. Someday perhaps I am rich, but I already am. Someday perhaps I am married, but I already am. Someday perhaps I am a fine painter, but I already am. These can be nothing else than manifestations of the am that is within me.

I am a ball of clay. I am a stone. I am the potters hands. I am none of these things.