IMAGES © DANIELLE BAUER & WILL FOLSOM
that produces bank deposits. Inside her trendy, brick-walled open office, everyone dresses like Paul Bunyan, (except they don’t know who that is), and they work a squillion hours a week. Breakfast’s free if you get in early. I am brilliant, me! I could help by ‘populating’ her starkly naked refrigerator with healthy home cooking! Instead, jet-lagged again, I fell into a sleep hole and awoke to the death rattles of whole grains shriveling in the pan. But all was cleaned up, and I scuttled off to the bus stop for my next appointment, with my mobile charger safely packed to ensure maximum uselessness. I made some new chums amongst the doorway dwellers. Aren’t holidays great? You can’t
work, even if you feel you should. I relaxed against cool bus windows, idly gazing at serene views of the famous bridge, and rolled dreamily onward through the Golden State. They like to call it that because it sounds better than Drought-ridden Dead Plant State. Reality met me on a corner when I got off the bus. Leftover smoke from my cookpan had insidiously wafted upstairs and set off alarms for the whole building, requiring total evacuation and a visit from the fire department; and panicked phone calls amongst the residents, the apartment’s phantom owner in another state and my daughter the illegal tenant called home from work. Two counties had been searching for the arsonist, everyone
supposing I had become a bridge jumper due to embarrassment. That would have made more sense than the decisions I actually made. For those who haven’t been, San Francisco’s public transit has failed the public so badly that there’s not even a decent train under which the despondent might throw themselves. So I can’t return to the City-bythe-Bay-of-Shame, because people there can judge me, and only too accurately. I have entered the twilight zone between Too Young To Be Rid Of and Too Old To Be Useful, and now require a minder. This is why I tell people that I used to live in the state of California. But now I live in the state of Confusion.
The American
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