Category: Uncategorized

I was living in a Victorian on Frederick Street between Waller and Ashbury.

I was living with 6 other people. Half of us were part of Spinoza’s Coat and the other half weren’t. Not that created any tension, or anything.

The first big outing I went on after returning back home in San Francisco was seeing “The Royal Tenenbaums” at the Red Vic. All my flatmates were there as well as some folks from the Reverie. Most of them were either poets or musicians who barely made a living in San Francisco as barristas.

One of my flatmates started crying while she was watching the movie. I really didn’t get it at the time.

During that month, I volunteered a lot. I went to Bayview to fix bicycles because although lots of people ride bicycles in the Bayview, there isn’t a bicycle shop close by like in the Haight.

When I would go to the Reverie, I would write poems. I wanted to be like the poet barristas I saw.

Movie: The Royal Tenenbaums
Book: The Timaeus by Plato

Before I leave San Francisco and leave for Los Angeles, I’m going to spend some time each day thinking about the months I’ve been in San Francisco.

In April 2002, I just returned back from living in Bolzano, Italy. Half the people there spoke German. I have the journal where I would write all my thoughts in German. I wrote my last German entry the day I got back to San Francisco.

I thought I would never come back to San Francisco, but I was pulled back by all these wonderful people I met when I’d come back home.

April 2002

book: The Timaeus by Plato

music: Lenny Kravitz

food: Mahi Mahi with coconut Rice (cooked by Matthew Morrissey)

My favorite party question: What about you do you think is sexy?

Quote of the Month: “Who somebody is or was we can know only by knowing the story of which he (or she) is him (or herself) the hero.” from Hannah Arrendt’s “Human Condition,” p. 186.

During this time, I would spend most of my days in the Reverie Coffee Shop. I would wake up in the morning, get my coffee and just read philosophy and write. During the day random people would stop by, and we would chat for as short as a smoke or as long as an hour. People have lost the art of doing this, but at that time, the web was thought to be dead. We returned to a more natural way of relating.

My life was carefree.

I belonged to a philosophy group called Spinoza’s Coat. We would meet every Tuesday evening to discuss philosophy. It consisted of mostly like minded folks who met at the Reverie, or what we nicknamed, “The Rev.”

That April we were reading Plato’s Timaeus. It’s Plato’s attempt at a metaphysics of the material world. I like how he just defined something like time as “the moving image of Eternity.”

I was very happy to be back in my home town after living abroad.

I hope you’ll stick around for my blog post on May 2002!

Zoe Greystone: The human brain contains roughly contains 300 megabytes of information. Not much when you get right down to it. The question isn’t how to store it. It’s how to access it. You can’t download a personality. There’s no way to translate the data. But the information being held in our heads is available in other databases. People leave more than footprints as they travel through life: medical scans, dna profiles, psych evaluations, school records, emails, recording, video, audio, cat scans, genetic typing, synaptic records, security cameras, test results, shopping records, talent shows, ball games, traffic tickets, restaurant bills, phone records, music lists, movie tickets, TV shows… even prescriptions for birth control.