s t i m u l u s

It's astonishing how little stimulus I was getting in Maine.

It's a combination of factors. Like, I never worked "normal" job in Maine. I teleworked and traveled around the country. Never had casual, regular day-to-day contact with coworkers--how was your weekend? did you see last night's Top Model? wanna grab lunch? Or, really, day-to-day contact with anyone.

Even when I was in a relationship, no day-to-day contact b/c he was part of a start-up and worked a great deal of the time, and we never lived together.

And otherwise, for 4+ years, I would go literally for days, sometimes even weeks, with little or no actual contact with people. Just phone and email.

Living in the apartment I did, if I felt lonely I would just look out the window and get absorbed by the vast, sometimes desolate, beauty of the sea and sky. And almost forget people.

I felt very self-conscious in Portland. There were so few people, relative to other places I'd lived, I felt like I stuck out when I walked down the street. And I did. Everybody does stick out. There's not a ton of bustle on the streets.
A friend who was visiting from New York once said "What's with people here? they drive up Congress Street looking left and right out their windows - what are they looking at?" And the answer was if you drive (or bike or walk) up Congress Street you can see pretty much everything that's going on. There's almost never more than a few people or things going on.

And you kind of check in, as you're heading home, driving up the Hill. Who's that? oh, it's so-and-so and such-and-such -- new jacket! what are those people doing? oh, there's a puppy with them.

I remember making myself go outside and walk to the Rite Aid, not hide in the anonymity of my car, and sure enough a couple of days later a neighbor commented she had seen me walking up Congress Street with "lots of plastic Rite Aid bags!!" Whether or not their was censure to be inferred from the "plastic bags" observation (i.e., not using cloth bags) I will never know.
But encounters like that made me more self-conscious than I already was (or am).

Not about my use of plastic vs cloth bags (I'm unaffected if someone judges me on my bag choice) but about being observed. Having so little going on that any movement is a focal point. And not being able to blend into a scene. Not to be intrinsically part of a moving mosaic of living bodies and independent and interconnected lives.

There's just not that much going on in Portland that you can just blend in, and move around freely, unobserved, which is my preferred mode. You can do so--and I did--but it took ongoing and deliberate effort, and with a hefty amount of isolation as a result.

In contrast, there is so much going on here. Or certainly feels that way. And it may be the profound "contrast" between the stimulus levels of Portland and San Francisco. I have lived and spent much of my life in NYC and DC. I don't recall feeling this overwhelmed by sensation and stimulation n either of those places. Maybe I was when I moved to DC - I don't recall.

But here in San Francisco, at times I feel almost like an infant who doesn't yet have the capacity to take in everything and make sense of it, and cries from sheer overwhelmitude. Not often. But today,after lunch in the Castro (delicioso!)

I went to Mission Delores Park. It was a scene.

Sorta like the Eastern Prom in Portland...

Except packed with people, like it is, once a year on 4th of July...

And while there were kids there - in fact there's a rad playground frequented by dozens of rainbow kids - it was mostly a non-family scene, per se. Individuals, couples, groups of friends. And lots and lots of dogs. Roguing it up with each other. Running and jumping through the piles of people. And a field where people played soccer and frisbee.

So then I walked through the Mission. And this time it didn't smell like poo. I think I was in a "less good area" the last time I visited the Mission. No one seemed to be pooing on the street today. Which I appreciated.

What was there was block after block of sheer activity and stimulus. I couldn't even take photos. I was too astounded, floored, agog. Just drinking in as much as I could...until I was a tick bloated to capacity with lifeblood stimulus.

That's when I felt for a moment like crying. I wasn't sad or anything. I just could take in no more, and couldn't make sense of everything I was seeing and hearing. Could understand why a baby might just unleash a wah!

It's a reasonable response. But I didn't do so. It happened after I asked a woman about the avocados she was selling out of a box. "How much for both?" and "Are they ripe?" i said, in Spanish. It startled me, walking away. I hadn't realized I knew the word for "both" or for "ripe," but apparently learned in high school, and somewhere in this open and addled mind, the words burbled up because they needed to.

Afterward I spotted a whole Sketchers shoe store. I love Sketchers - wearing them in the '90s in DC. And here's a whole, giant store - wow! Sketchers were everywhere. More styles, designs, colors, textures, ornamentation, inventive displays, sale racks than I could dream of. Hip low-key music and nice people in the store. After about 3 minutes I was completely full-up, and had to stagger back to the street and go home.

So, again. There are no giant Sketchers stores, filled with people animatedly speaking 16 different languages, in Maine.

I was essentially living in beautiful hermitage for the past 4.5 years.

It'll take a while to get my city feet.

I grabbed a cab, instead of the BART...it was like floating on a cloud, with a lovely Jamaican driver who talked like music the whole way home. It grew quieter and quieter. Fewer people. The colors faded from tempera to pastels. The buildings stood straighter up and down, classic features. More green leafy trees. Hills. The Bay twinkling appealingly. Kind of like an expanded, more expansive Portland.

I decided I'll remain in Russian Hill for the next month.

I still aspire to live in the Mission. But there's no harm in slowing down, pacing myself. Like it or not I'm something of a rube right now, content to make forrays into swirling stimulus, walking with my eyes open wide, and mouth agape, completely unwatched, a speck of color in the mosaic.