Far Far Away

It’s been a weekend filled with launches, dreams, and hopes.

Yesterday I was excited to attend my friend Jamil Moledina’s book launch. His new book — like mine, his first — Tearing the Sky is a magnificently compelling work of “hard science-fiction” — an oft-overlooked sub-genre of speculative fiction that deals with “real” science and humanity’s prospects for harnessing it in the far future. The really far future, in his case: the book is set 360,000 years hence, yet still features a college-age protagonist dealing with dating and female angst. It’s Isaac Asimov by way of Boy Meets World.

His event was a boffo success, with a full house at Borderlands Books, San Francisco’s sci-fi bookstore. They gave a big plug to indie publishing (Jamil did it this way as well, with some help from yours truly, after encountering endless frustration at the hands of a small-time L.A. publishing house); it’s good to see indie bookstores embracing their indie author kin — something I wrote about some months back.

This morning I had brunch with my friend Steven at Home, one of the Castro’s many breakfast joints teeming on a Sunday noon (what is it with gay guys and brunch, anyway?) Steven was at one time probably the perfect example of the changing tide of the city; far from a place where unconventional folks went to “just be,” San Francisco’s turned into another major (expensive) world center like London or New York — places described by the protagonist in Eat Pray Love in one word: “ambition.” When I met Steven in 2007 he seemed hell-bent on becoming a software mogul a la Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, with all the competitiveness and careerism that entailed.

But then, like me, something changed. After a flame-out of a relationship of his own, he too tried something different: he went to Buenos Aires for a month and had the time of his life. But that only left him craving more: he’s now seriously contemplating going away for longer, maybe doing some sort of Four Hour Work-Week type of arrangement, blending work and travel for an extended period on the road. Toward the end of our meal, he delivered a surprising line: he thanked me for being an inspiration.

I couldn’t believe it. Really, me? Further evidence, I suppose, that one’s life adventures have the capacity to incite others — even if that wasn’t the goal.

Feeling suitably inspired, and with some book-tour travels of my own about to start (and with the weather unseasonably glorious in normally chilly San Francisco), I hopped on my little scooter and did something everyone living in a major tourist destination should do once in a while: see their hometown anew.

Rolling up Nob Hill, then northward toward “crookedest” Lombard Street, I headed west into the Presidio, finally reaching Fort Point. America’s only all-brick fortification on the Pacific, it sits perched at the southern edge of the narrow inlet known as the Golden Gate. Above it climbs a spider web of orange girders that make up the start of the Golden Gate Bridge — yes, bridge builders of the 1930s had a unique challenge not only in siting a span over a windy, foggy waterway, but also gently threading it over a historic Civil War-era structure. The result, as with so many places in San Francisco, is sublime.

Sitting on the western bastion of the fort watching the sun sink into the Pacific, I found myself joined by a small-scale modeling photo shoot. A reminder that this is still San Francisco, as the skinny, leggy model was wearing an outlandish outfit, with crazy-colored hair pulled up in an impossible knot. No doubt this is another lynchpin in the aspirations of the young photographers and the model herself. And another reminder that this metropolis perched at the end of the Western Hemisphere remains a land of fancy, of dreams… a jumping-off point for endeavors, and travels, great and small.