Hey Bitches, I'm Back!

Hello San Francisco, good to see you, it's been too long.

I've been back in The City for about a week now, and walking around, not much seems to have changed in the two years I've been gone. Checking out club posters in the Castro yesterday I saw many of the same names, and same concepts, that were on those posters when I left, and my traditional watering holes had many of the same faces on both sides of the bar. But if not much has changed in the material world of gay SF during my exile years (putting aside the frankly confusing demise of The Eagle), I've been making the effort over the past few days to adjust my perceptual apparatus, to calibrate it back to that state when I first came to San Francisco in 1999, and perhaps see the same things differently. When I first came to San Francisco, fresh out of grad school and as desperately glad to be out of Atlanta as I am to be out of Baltimore now, there was a glamor that radiated from everyone and everything, and cast a spell of enchantment over me. For a while I was able to give up on being the skeptical, cynical East Coast intellectual and simply be enthralled by the spirit of the City, to find it all quite marvelous and fascinating. Over time, of course, those perceptions changed, and it was difficult, particularly by the time I left, to not find the rot at the center of the bloom.

Whether or not I can find a way to throw wide the doors of perception again, returning to a place should not also automatically entail a return to the same modes of being, falling back into the same comfortable attitudes and ideas. There are some mistakes I think I made during my last residence in SF, and some things I've had ample opportunity to ruminate upon during cold, dark nights in the Baltimore winter. I came back to San Francisco not necessarily to pick up where I left off, but to try and strike out in a way that's substantially new. I haven't really decided what to do with this blog yet, whether the way it focuses my attention, and upon what, is something that that will ultimately help or hinder my efforts in trying to find this new direction, but, for a little while at least, it continues to give me a good excuse for going out and seeing what there is to see.