Sunday, April 3, 2011

Untitled Musing on Berkeley

Berkeley is a strange place. Muddy streets discarded from public funding mesh into a university which has lost a proportional amount of zeros from its monthly paycheck. Pot dealers and trust fund babies turned street kids cohabitate the same corners as Girl Scouts and fathers attempting to teach their children to stay away from the ever-increasing mire. And all the while autumnal trees and hills crossed with both affluence, energy, and the regenerative effects of that nameless historical fire loom over a city that doesn’t even have the audacity to call it as it is. A suburb of San Francisco? An extension of Oakland? The collegiate equivalent of a mid-life crisis embodied in a town with so much diversity yet so little understanding. Always one minute away from acquiring a mistress and new car smell and renaming itself Silverlake. Always one earthquake away from watching the whole crippling fucking mess disappear.

I sip on my coffee and watch the father nervously eye a homeless man hammering scraps of metal into a wooden bench. That’s how they get you, ya know. One minute it’s just hammering bits of rusty nails and tetanus stained newspaper stand shreds and the next minute he’s taking your car keys and driving your daughter to an undisclosed location somewhere in San Pablo. They’d always go to fucking San Pablo. And it’s because he knows you’d look in Oakland first. Probably Richmond as well. It’s a racial thing, really. Intimidating Black Actor takes Innocent Bystander Child to Richmond to his cocaine filled mansion. Hollywood would buy that shit (presuming the acceptable amount of production money and star power, of course). And so the father twists his gears compulsively re-writing a plotline that’s likely already sitting on a prominent WME agent’s desk. He’s such a disappointment. He couldn’t even pick a plotline that made it past the drawing board. His daughter should be cuter, or at least more successful at selling Girl Scout cookies. And more importantly, he shouldn’t be such an asshole. Grieving fathers would never have the audacity to condescendingly tell the homeless man to create his “artwork” elsewhere. There’s no room for error in Berkeley, though. The faultlines here are both geographical and emotional. He’d drive the kids to school so that they don’t get into trouble. He’d pack lunches before going to his environmentally conscious law firm. He’d email teachers to see if there was any extracurricular guidance he could offer the youngest one, who’s been recently having difficulty with spelling and grammar. He’d allow the girls to eat ice cream, but only if they had vegetables with dinner. He’d make cheesy jokes at restaurants and inwardly smile as his children blush. He’d be a miserable fucking bore who watches American Idol and might even text in a vote occasionally. He’d actively embody every suburban-yet-edgy cliché that Berkeley has to offer.

There’s only one way to raise a child in a place destined to raze itself. For all the things I hate about Berkeley, I hate how I can sit and drink coffee while he does it all so beautifully.

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