New Year's Day

...was about four weeks ago. I spent it in San Francisco with my awesome friend Tesla, who blogs about world music and sci-fi, fantasy, and action films at This Mortal Coil (one of the single best blogs on the internets).

I hadn't been to San Francisco since I visited with my father and my brother in the mid 1990's. We did all the textbook tourist stuff then: Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, Ghiradelli Square, and, of course, illegally riding on the cable cars (for a conservative businessman type, my dad is kind of a badass). This happened back during those strange and darkly wondrous years after my parents' divorce but before my father's marriage to his current wife. My brother and I traveled back and forth between our parents homes back then- joint custody meant that we spent a week at one house before being ferried back to the other (it was kind of like Persephone's journey between Olympus and Hell, only cycling much more frequently).

During this time, my father planned many vacations for us to see the iconic sites and cities of the American landscape: there was a desert adventure to Las Vegas, Hoover Dam, and the Grand Canyon, a road trip through the New England of his childhood, with stops in busy New York City and Boston Harbor, but also sleepy Vermont and Maine, and journeys through the grandeur and beauty of California, like Mammoth Lakes during the winter or the orchards of Julien on lazy weekends during the school year. However, San Francisco ranks as the most magical of the these vacations, and my most recent visit reaffirms my belief that it is one of the great American cities.

Tesla and her boyfriend treated me to an orgy of delight while I was in town, and highlights include the De Young Museum, Joust, Amoeba Records, Dengue Fever, Yves Saint Laurent, Bomberman, and so much more. My favorite thing was probably on New Year's Day, when Tesla took me on a tour of her neighborhood, the Mission District, to check out all of the cool street art/wall murals/grafitti. Visual evidence is located here.

During the day, I had time to make myself several New Year's resolutions for 2009. Chief among them: move to San Francisco.