"there's a feeling I get when I look to the west"

Cliff House: by JpLPeople often ask me, “if you could choose between Los Angeles, Manhattan, and Paris, where would you most want to live?” My answer is always the same: San Francisco. When asked why, I struggle to put into words a concrete reason that makes me yearn for that little city up north. It is more a feeling than a particular purpose—maybe there’s something in the foggy air… or in the Hetch Hetchy water. The truth is, San Francisco as a place has meant many different things to me, and with several different people over the years. All I really know, is that even in comparison to a warm, late fall walk through Central Park, or flaneuring through Paris at Sunset, I am somehow most whole when sitting on the westernmost edge of San Francisco’s Sunset District, at Ocean Beach’s Kelly’s Cove, watching the small waves roll in, listening to Neil Young’s On the Beach, eating a burrito from Chino’s or Gordo’s, all under a gloomy gray sky. I grew up in the center of Los Angeles, but have only really found my own center within the superficiality of that glamorous, sunny, city when near the ocean, especially on the Venice Beach boardwalk. No matter where I am, I find peace from just staring out at the ocean. When I can sit on a bench or even in a parked car in the parking lot overlooking Ocean Beach – which admittedly has maybe the most uncreative and BORING name of any beach I have encountered – I am at peace, reflective, even happy. There is something meditative in looking out over the open water. Kelly’s Cove is just south of the Sutro Baths and the Cliff House, with richly colored hills rolling in the background aside those wonderfully San Franciscan townhouses of almost as many colors behind me along Great Highway (or really, to the east, but behind me when I’m sitting on a bench facing the water). I have always lived my life with a soundtrack playing in the background, the lyrics of Jimmy Page or Neil Young or some other great rock mind articulating so poignantly that which I am feeling or experiencing or seeing. Maybe it’s “a feeling I get when I look to the west,” seeing “the sky about to rain,” but somehow the music aids the moment, makes it whole, bringing me closer to myself.

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