It takes so long to fly anywhere to get to somewhere that is not San Francisco.
If you have never been here, I would say it's a lot like living on the edge of world, perhaps as I would imagine living in Tahiti or New Zealand would be. For better or worse, you're so far away that all those books and television photographs of the outside world start to flatten out and become less and less real, abstracting into lines of a map of the earth. People live and dream here in the present, and one or twice a year for a week or so they get sucked away to exotic locations where photographs and perhaps videos are taken. Nobody is really sure if those faraway places exist.
There are all kinds of different people in the world, many them with different hopes and dreams but all are shaped somewhat by their environment and the possibilities around them. In the Las Vegas airport I feel such a sense of despair and hopelessness that I hope the city outside is nothing like the airport. The slot machines offered aboslutely no sense of excitement or glamour; they were flat and garish and bleeping late into the night. On these night shifts the tired, older people worked, wearing ill-fitting polo shirts and sloppy nametags at an angle.
Perfume vending machines pump out sample scents and glow airbrushed photos of Jennifer lopez spreadeagled across 4 planes. I think the city is very close nearby; I hope there is more wonder. I hope that the young women there can explore new possibilities, become something new and beautiful before the world around them changes that.
I would love to see the transformation, like the pretty girl shaking off failed attempts at an acting career in Hollywood who flips out and decides to open a cafe that becomes wildly successful. She starts to eat after many years of starvation, starts to stretch out her legs and take risks and become her own person. It's a wonderful thing, like growing plants for the first time or seeing kittens become cats. One of my friends has a science kit in which you can grow seeds in agaric (?) watching the roots spread out through the clear solution. It's really magical. The former wannabe movie star's eyes light up as she regains her humanity. Remove yourself from the wrong kinds of influences and then surround yourself with the right kinds of ideas and people and nice things happen.
The Chicago and Denver airports have a humming self-confidence that cannot be matched by airports of smaller, struggling towns. Everything is bright, shiny and new. The bookstore at the Denver airport feels uncomfortable. There is none of the arm coziness I associate with the best best bookstores; yet I have to admit, the book displays are surprisingly clever, and I would not expect people to be reading some of the things I see here. But at the same time the airport is stripped of all romance no matter how hard people try. At least there are docking stations tailored for ipods where you can sit squashed next to a businessman making a call. The restaurants try to act like marketplaces in Mexico, but they are not very convincing, although the kitchen staff speaks a happy Spanish in the background.
The restaurants all smell eerily of plastic. In Chicago it is properly international, at least in the airport. There are lots of people who look more or less the same as everyone else, no matter what skin color or shape or gender. The men in suits nursing a beer in the uncomfortable sports bars, watching a game while neurotically tapping away at their BlackBerries. They look startlingly vulnerable there bathed in neon, exhausted boys tired and stressed out from a fast world.
There is so much pressure on men to appear strong, especially these really conservative old-fashioned men, the kind you're really wary of when they travel in packs wearing baseball caps. They've been socialized to pay for women's dinners on dates, marry at exactly a certain age, watch American football, and accept certain responsibilities. In more conservative American circles men regard women as these exotic weird things, and they are at a loss when dealing with cosmetics counters and hair salons. It's like those countries where men and women are raised in separate environments, so that they often forget that they aren't that much different from each other. Socialized the proper way, these men are told that women come from venus and men come from mars, even though humans come from the planet earth.
When they are alone, you can talk to a guy like that like he's a real person. There are just so many fears and complex things going on down there, suppressed, and I can really feel these things more than most people can, so that, terrified, he backs off and then returns to his tribe. We both realize that maybe this group thing isn't so bad after all and these groups of men being obnoxious to women (who they really yearningly love) really don't want to hurt us, they're just deeply fearful.
One of the things that really surprised me when I came back to America is that, like many people in the world, a lot of people don't like to move around so much. As transient as Americans are, there are people who enjoy staying put and sink their roots deep, deep into the ground. Not everyone is an explorer, and a lot of people's social circles began and ended in high school. There are people in America who willingly hang out only with people they went to high school with. It's such a foreign concept to me, like red bean ice cream.
Once I moved to San Francisco, I opened my mind a little and tried out hanging out with high school people. It was very cool actually, a little bizarre. I hang out with another group of people here who are really cool and went to high school together, then moved out here en masse. It works for them, but I get a sense that they decided to escape all at once together. That's when groupthink is positive and works for the good of the world.
One of the people from high school I willingly hung out with admitted he would never willingly hang out with someone from high school. But there we were, hanging out with each other, facing each other as adults, although we would both admit that escaping and moving around was the best thing we could have done. I hung out with another person willingly and it's become a wonderful relationship, because we are both different and the same as we were when we were teenagers. We are much more interesting and less awkward now than we were then, but when we look each other in the eye we still see eighteen year olds. My friends from high school (who escaped) travel heavily, almost more than many Europeans or New Yorkers that I know. I am starting to realize that San Francisco is a really special kind of place that attracts a lot of talented people so maybe it's that kind of effect.
In one airport in a crumbling Midwestern town I was struck at how effortlessly friendly people were. In the Midwest it's genuine, as you can't fake that kind of one-on-one upfrontness. If you are coming there from Europe or New York, it strikes you as intrusive at first, but then you realize it's just how things are in a small town where everyone hangs out with people they went to high school with. In a 15 minute bus ride to the car rental stop the bus driver will be able to tell you more than you could ever imagine. The accents are flat and American and offer more personal information than you could hope for in encountering a stranger you meet in the London Tube. You grow to like it, this effortless push of humanity. These people might hang out with people from high school, but they're all right. They wouldn't pull a Dogville on Nicole Kidman, they'd be the ones helping the slaves escape through the Underground Railroad.
In the Midwest, at the big farmer's food markets on weekends, there are big sacks of onions for only $3. People all over the world, even in New York and Paris and San Francisco gather and talk to each other at such markets, but there's something exotic about a farmer's market in a place that still has real farmers. These are not those really hip organic farmers but practical men wearing baseball caps and have unironic beards, who drive pick-up trucks full of tools in the back and hopefully are genteel to ladies at the sports bar. There are no alfalfa sprouts here. Surrounded by fresh produce, tomatoes and corn as fresh as the eye can see, everyone goes in a beeline for the greasy breakfast of corned-beef and deep friend eggs. Corned beef for breakfast! You see signs for it everywhere. They sell vegetables here, maybe someone eats them, maybe if they're fried?
At the airport there are a lot of hockey fans. It's a big shock after going from Los Angeles to San Francisco, because everyone's so sexy in L.A., even the poodles and 6 year old girls, who wear skin-tight t-shirts that say "I'm hot!" and an even bigger shock if you say move from Los Angeles to parts of the midwest, and especially if you are confronted with huge waves of hockey fans. Hockey jerseys hide a multitude of bodily bumps and are perhaps like the veils of modesty that women wear in Riyadh, unrelentingly blocky and large to make room for padding, so that no sign of hard Hollywood six-pack abs would be visible. No chance.
Female hockey fans are forced to go through a debeautifying routine, the opposite of what happens at the end of a make-up counter visit at a major department store. It's amazing, a brave new world in which people must remove all plumage and accept each other for what they are "on the inside." There are always urban legends going around too about how there is a hockey puck that went out of control and went into a sexy young female hockey fan's face and disfigured here for a year. Then she found out if her boyfriend really loved her for her personality. But you can figure that out way ahead of time if you wear a hockey jersey.
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