touring San Francisco - Sunday January 31 1999
After another relaxing morning with cable teevee, videotapes and continental breakfasts, Kim and I decided to go on a little walking tour of San Francisco. Naturally enough, I suppose, we walked down to nearby Haight Street and headed west into the Haight-Ashbury district. Like, dude, I heard it was all about hippies and such. Truth be known, there wasn't much of a scene down there on this particularly gorgeous Sunday. It really wasn't that much better than Bethesda Avenue in Bethesda Maryland, except perhaps for the lack of thirty-something mothers and their hyper-alloy tandem baby carriages. I noticed that some motorists had solved the pervasive parking "challenge" by simply parking on the sidewalk.
Then this girl walked up to me randomly and asked if I was Gus. She didn't immediately look like anyone I know, though I am familiar with her pictures. It was Jen Wade, one of the online journal world's more famous diarists, formerly of Boston, now a resident of San Francisco. When she'd read that I'd be in her town, she'd written to ask me to meet her. I'd gone so far as transcribing her phone number from email to a scrap of paper in my wallet, but this happy coincidence made our actually hanging out all very easy. I wasn't in especially top form for meeting new people mind you; my voice was a sad wisp of its usual strength, and since no one could hear me when I talked, I'd sort of fallen out of the practice. So I let Kim do most of the talking. She's always a good stand-in when I'm socially crippled.
We did coffee at an overpriced (I suppose) Middle Eastern place near the end of Haight. I ordered a $1.75 cup of coffee and it came out in a cup the size of a shot glass. It was super sweet and rather strong. Jen talked a little about how she'd moved out to San Francisco to be with her then-boyfriend, Jay from Hawaii, perhaps the first online journal-keeper ever. Love being what it is in the 90s, he broke up with her only a week later. We talked some about our journals, what drives us, what doesn't drive us. For her, she says, there's never been any issue of her journal getting her in trouble, for those are the places she doesn't go. (With a few exceptions; for awhile she was keeping a fairly juicy "secret diary" to which a few people, such as myself, were privy.) It's rather different for me, of course. But our inspiration came from the same source: the magical, difficult-to-follow but gloriously noncensored Daze of Justin Hall. Note from Jen Wade on these things:
OK, now you've got yet another person to question the veracity of your diary statements! But I just wanted to clarify that I didn't move to SF to be with Jay. I decided to move here before he did, actually.
I know it sounds like a silly thing to niggle about, but it's a widespread misconception, and I don't really like being thought of as the kind of person who would give up everything for SOME GUY.
Anyway, just wanted to clear that up!
See Jen Wade's account of our meeting.