After the Rush #2 — The Chapter in My Life Entitled San Francisco
This is the second post in a new series called After the Rush. It’s a space to explore things outside of work and reconnect with my creative side.
Hello from Austin,
I’m on summer break right now and making space for creative projects. Lately, I’ve been going back and re-listening to some of my favorite albums, start to finish. Comfortable chair, headphones on, no interruptions. Letting the music hit the way it used to, before the phone in your pocket made it so easy to drift away from the moment.
This essay is about one of those songs—and the moment it found me. It’s about moving across the country at 24, chasing a new life, and the chapter that song helped me write.
Artist: The Lucksmiths
Album: Warmer Corners
Key song: The Chapter in Your Life Entitled San Francisco
Year: 2005
Chapter One - Brooklyn
I first heard this song on Myspace. If you were around back then, that should set the scene. I was killing time in my Brooklyn bedroom in front of a boxy monitor and large desktop computer that dominated the small wooden desk wedged in the corner of the room. It was a good apartment, two blocks away from the Bedford Avenue stop, a nice rooftop we would hang on, drink beer, and look out over the Manhattan Skyline. My roommate Adam and I moved into that apartment during a big winter blizzard. Thankfully, we were moving from an apartment only one block away. We had decided to move to find something a little more quiet (an additional block from the subway!) and although time has washed away the circumstances… I do remember that first apartment having mice.
We toured our new spot a block away with the Hassidic landlord, and at the end of the tour he took us to the rooftop and we all marveled at the view while he smoked a cigarette. The roof sealed the deal.
Back to that boxy monitor in the corner. Like many evenings I was passing the time browsing the web and my friend’s Myspace profiles and came across this catchy little tune by The Lucksmiths. Good timing. After a few years in New York I was ready for a new job and maybe a new life. But mostly, I knew I needed a job that wasn’t shitty and corporate. I had stopped caring about my work and that just wasn’t the way I operated as a person. I took things seriously and so my lack of commitment was a clear sign I needed to find something else to do. I was 24.
It was 2005 and I was spending a lot of time online. I had moved to Williamsburg in 2004 and it was the place to be. Every week a new bar, restaurant, art gallery or music venue opened. There was a lot going on and so I followed local music and lifestyle blogs and websites to find stuff to do. I’d look up restaurants on Citysearch and read album reviews in Brooklyn Vegan and The AV Club section of The Onion. I still had a Hotmail email address, but knew I needed to switch to Gmail. I’d find new places to check out in Manhattan (mostly pubs and cheap restaurants) and print out directions from Mapquest or Yahoo Maps.
So when I bit the bullet and decided I’d find a new job sometime in late 2005 I figured I should go work for one of those websites.
So I applied to Google— no response until I shit you not— 4 years later when I was running things at Yelp and they reached back out. (by the way, when I applied to Google I nabbed my Gmail address).
I applied to The Onion and went for a walk with the Manager of the Ad sales team in New York, around the block of their SOHO offices. Seemed like a cool place to work, the manager was decidedly average— I never heard back. Funny how Jeff Lawson, Founder of Twilio, owns it now.
So it was around this time while I was scrolling profiles on MySpace that I came across The Lucksmiths and their jangly indie-pop song about San Francisco. It’s a heart-on-your-sleeve little ditty about how his girlfriend “disappears into departures” at the Melbourne airport, presumably never to return as she stakes out a new life in that foggy city of dreams by the Bay.
The lyrics are ace as the melody kicks along “Should it one day come to pass…. that you sit down to your memoirs….where will this go? …The Chapter in your life entitled San Francisco.”
It’s a reminder that when you disappear and go build a new life, the old one remains in a parallel dimension.
And 20 years later, when you think back on that time, it will be filled with new experiences, new places, you will see nothing but the new parallel path that you had the guts to take.
Of course, the sad boyfriend from our song realizes that when he looks back on this time in his life— he’ll be left with same old places in Melbourne, all just a little sadder without her. That’s what his Chapter will be about, if it makes the final cut of his book.
But for his ex-girlfriend, well this might just be the critical chapter of her story, the turning point. And it will be definitely be in her book, and it will probably be everyone’s favorite. Everyone loves San Francisco, or at least they used to back in the 90s and early aughts. It was a “cute” place to move to from NY. More charming and literary than LA, and of course for New Yorkers, you only had three choices in the US. Still do.
So San Francisco was calling me and it started showing up everywhere, like when you are thinking about getting a new Volvo and it turns out everyone in town seems to be driving one suddenly.
There was something about those lyrics that made me want to be the person on the other side, the person that leaves for a new life, leaves everyone wondering, “What happened to that guy?” What a gift to be young and be able to give yourself a blank page to write from. A new chapter. Pick your place, pick your scene, pick your characters, pick your plot and make it twist. I wanted to be like the girl in the song, I wanted to be the one pined after. In the last verse he sings “Are you ever coming home? Or should I learn, to do without you…?”
It was quite clear to me at the time that I wasn’t coming back to NY.
Chapter Two - San Francisco
“I went a fortnight without so much as an email
Then a postcard scant of detail
In which you wished me all the best
From the non-specific north west”
I decided I would be the one so focused on building my new life that I wouldn’t have time for much more than a few scribbles on a post card, dropped in a postbox on the top of Nob Hill as I hopped a Cable Car to head to work. Too much to do, too much life to live.
I didn’t know it at the time but expectations in your 20s can be dangerous. The world is filled with 30 and 40 somethings who had some mad plan to re-invent themselves and five years later returned home with their head in their hands, wrinkles on their faces and a lifetime full of regret and wonder about why their plan failed to hatch, why they didn’t “make it.”
The gods would have other plans for me. I wouldn’t be left with regret, I was given a notepad, pen, clean sheet of paper and told simply “write young man, and let’s see what happens.” I had decided to write and star in my own movie.
Within days of landing at SFO in my new uniform (a pair of levi’s, band tee shirt, black hoodie with white ipod headphones poking out) I was smitten.
I was destined to love San Francisco, and my new life, to be the star of that song, writing a centerpiece chapter of my memoir. Inspired by work and the new life I was building— the foggy hills, early morning walks, the clang of a cable car as it crested over Russian Hill, the bay to my left, and ahead, little pastel wooden houses clung to streets around me, holding on to the only place they’ve ever known. They didn’t seem to appreciate their birthplace, they were a little beat up, but I sure did—probably because at 24 somehow I was already a little beat up myself, and this new place “at the edge of western civilization” was giving me a chance. Out there past the Golden Gate was the Pacific, I couldn’t go any further, I had reached the end of the road and yet I was just a kid, and so I had better make it work.
For me, a kid from Maryland, San Francisco may not be home, but it was going to be a part of my story. A part of who I became…I was sure of that and because I was so sure of it… it did.
“Are you warm enough?
I remember how the fog comes off the water
And the days are ever shorter
And I worry you’ll be cold
Or have you found someone to hold?”
I did find someone to hold. Cindy and I are still together, 19 years later. I was so smitten I made her a mixtape (on a CD!) the first one I'd made since high school.
This song was on it.
I knew the move to the west coast was a turning point because I had decided to make it one—a new chapter.
Ever since my move to San Francisco, I’ve tried to think of life that way, in chapters. It reminds me the story is still unfolding, and that I’m the one writing it. I better make the next one count. I wonder what’s going to happen to that guy Pete. Better brew a pot of coffee and pick up the pen.
“Every man has two lives, and the second begins when he realizes he only has one.”
- Confucius
I was too young in San Francisco to realize that I only had one life, I felt like I’d live forever—like most 24 year olds do—but it did show me I could just do things. Quit the job, pack two suitcases, fly across the country, and figure out the rest later.
It’s my damn life.
A year after I arrived, I was in Cindy’s apartment when I noticed a calendar on the wall: “2007: Famous Castles.” Each month featured a fairytale fortress—France, Japan, Germany. Her favorite was Neuschwanstein Castle in southern Bavaria, the one that inspired the Disney castle. I told her, right then, that one day we’d go. It was a crazy thing to say, I had less than $200 in my bank account, but I meant it.
Seven years later, we did. Newly engaged, walking up that winding path together, we found it, perched in the clouds, just like the picture in the calendar.
Turns out you really can write your own story. You just have to believe.
Here’s to what we find.