...songs of doom & songs of doom...
...tales from the front lines of the bay area doom loop...
“Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”
-Homer-
They say my cities are doomed, that my town is done, and that what is isn’t anymore. They tell stories of this doom on the news. News which is no longer printed, just data on a server serving shrunken thoughts of something those reporting don’t really want to know. They eulogize, idealizing a vacation they spent here, or some years they lived holed up in an office down on the Peninsula starting up some rich teenagers' software set Shangri-la.
They feel like I feel, stubbing my toe on a bent iron bar casually dumped on a corner I just ran around. I pass two nickels near a broken bottle collecting gravel scratches. The pain can’t be my fault I hum, ten blocks later forgetting how I got hurt. Overnight throbbing becomes a beeping telephone line, then a taxi’s honk driving me into a fog I can fall back asleep in. I found two dimes today so I must be lucky.
I was, I wasn’t. I’m not, I no.
I don’t see what they see, smell what they smell, fear what they fear. The story goes that this town is dying, and that the only people who live here are remotes. They can turn on the screen and change the channel anytime. But they keep coming back to this show every week. They tell the producers how they lost the plot. They want different actors, new seasons and sets. They want a different show with the same title.
I live in Oakland, the rain shouts on my roof, typewriting me to a sleep I need but don’t want, sloppy mud awaiting my morning feet, cold spit on my boots, dried stains in one week.
I sleep in Oakland, a shopping cart scraping the street, cans sold for pennies tapping at a steel cage on wheels, a couple shouting until they can’t be angry anymore.
I wake in Oakland, New York City inks lined in plastic on my porch, a bag of french fries raccoon strewn next to a tree poking a power line holding two chirping squirrels planning a seed heist in my bird feeder shortly after noon and five minutes.
Doom is a backwards mood. It is condemnation, a sentence, fate and destiny. I’m told it is here now, swirling these cities, flushing us out. I live here amongst it. Hills and beaches that sound like slowly slowing dirge metal. Crows that crow hello every morning. Coyotes sweeping trails for the sunrise. A burrowing owl in the hill slabbed with concrete slurping the bay in and out for the egrets.
Doom is all over the bay. 44 different wildflowers choking up a landfill. A driftwood pirate ship with a plastic bucket plank. A fairyland up the hill from a briny lake, home to a castle with a cheshire cat chewing up the wall.
I see the suffering.
Years ago the rich kids started to make this place intolerable, so it’s no surprise they can’t tolerate it anymore. You can’t microdose hope or care. It’s better to bitch and be a bitch then to help and be the help. They are worried no one will serve them soup anymore. They need a shoe subscription to keep their sneakers clean. They need options made of stock, and stock made of animal bone and marrow. They want new software for their hardware and to live out reality in an unreal engine.
I want a good deli sandwich down Webster in Alameda.
It’s easy to be dead if you don’t live somewhere. I get why 23 year old dweebs might move to the bay and see addiction and rubbish and start bat signaling virtuously. One solution for the homeless would be to give them homes. Another would be to rebrand them “City Wizards™”. Or you could just tweet about it.
It is wild to live somewhere with endless engineers, so few of whom are willing to engineer solutions for the social dilemmas they moan about from million dollar condo-holes. We can code on crack, but can’t crack this code?
I want to eat shit at their dinner parties.
McDonald’s is doom. Burger King is doom. Factory farms peg legging chickens and tubing oil up their asses to give them double D bosoms plucked and punished into a bladed funnel chugged and gutted into soy sealed fake fleshes fried to dip in sugar sauces served with sides of carbonated caffeine. That is doom.
I want to play lute in a white castle and ding the dong of a taco bell.
They make great birria and pastor in Fruitvale.
Nonsense, a doomed thought if there ever was one. If sense is life, then nonsense is death. What went wrong with reality that we need to augment it? How did we keep track of each other before putting our faces in a book online? Does it worry you that billionaires want us to live in outerspace boxes while they build bunkers on someone else’s earth?
I think the war is not cultural.
I feel it is economic.
I see how broke we all are.
It sounds like there is no solution.
It smells like popcorn after midnight on Hollis street in Emeryville. A lamplight blinking over a woman with small dry hands as she dusts it with umami salts and shakes of furikake. It tastes great stale in my backpack on a hike up the hills.
Loops of doom are not places. They are humans. They are ideas stuck inside of the minds of misses. I miss my mind sometimes. I leave it behind to unwind somewhere amiss. My mind is yours to share.
Did you ever see the buffalo near the end of Golden Gate Park when you walk to the windmill? Near the ruins of the baths where the cold ocean wind whispers. There is a cave there that holds concerts.
You can go back anytime.
You can go back
and go back
and go back
and go back.
Loops are love. I put the song on repeat to hear it again. It is my chance to know what I already know. I know that I like it. I know what it sounds like. I need to hear if it still sounds that way. I need to see what I hear.
There is no point in standing still.
I stand still.
We called this year 2023. Two thousand and twenty three years, or three hundred and fifteen thousand, or four billion since we began as human. We own the problems on our earth. They are our own.
I want to own land someday. Hopefully here.
We make puzzles to pass time and confuse our self.
I watched basketball, a city covered in confetti. I saw seals shaking wet whiskers on a pier near Embarcadero. They chased fish guts flying from the side of a fifteen foot schooner.
We pulled up a mud shark and took the hook out of its lip. I wonder how it felt. The hook, the sky, the small drop of blood on its face. I saw my reflection in its eye. I tossed it back to the bay and watched a man windsurf in a carrot costume.
My first week in Oakland I sat in a rusted white hearse riddled with machine gun holes abandoned near the shipping crate streets of Jack London square. I saw a guy pop a moped wheelie and shoot a revolver at the starless sky. He howled like a devil bird. He called me baby, and told me this was the wild west.
Someone should set a cowboy movie at the Best Western Motel near the airport. Two backwards hats blowing the whistle down the street from a disc golf course. At the park jackrabbits chase away the skunks. The skunks chase away the prairie dogs. The hippies getting paid by google to play hockey come here on their lunch breaks.
If someone says I’m ugly, should I look in the mirror and see if they’re right? What if I become the mirror? What if I do something ugly?
Maybe without reflection, without intersection, our us and their them, we would see not us where we stand. We might instead see behind us. I walk and look forward, no clue what comes next.
They talk about you like they know you. They have never been here. They don’t live here. They don’t know you.
They spend time in their ideal. Their idea. Their own private idea-homes.
I live in the Bay every day, every day. I leave. I still live here. We live together, betrothed, beaten, and beloved.
The cities, the town, the area is doomed.
I came into this doom 20 years ago in October. I rented a haunted house numbered 667, one door down from some hell. The ghosts chased our cats and the streets sounded like static.
I moved into a warehouse made of plywood and free bread. I watched band after band play skanky skunk rock on a stage made of garbage, spilt paint and crusty comics. The bathroom was painted all black. Our neighbors grew weed and watched the matrix.
Years removed from those ghosts, ghouls and squat roommates skipping rent, I can still see this doom.
Doom is a beach. Doom is the ocean. Doom is hills of redwood, and grassland, and shrubs, dust and rock. Doom is a diner serving bowls of cioppino. Doom is garlic fries and a trolley and a skateboard park on 18th.
Doom is a house party. Doom is a bike ride. Doom is a sideshow shutting down a whole bridge. Doom is the sunset. Doom is a high five. Doom is a wildcat hunting in shadow on the ridge.
I walked a new trail two thousand feet high. My back pain became neck pain then just ankles and mind. I stared at the sky, all puff painted clouds, an ocean kissing the ass of bay area hills. I remembered I live here. I remembered I’m doomed.
The next time anyone asks me how to describe your writing I'm going to say it's like a revolver shot at the starless sky. And if they're not intrigued by that, they shouldn't come here, because they probably wouldn't be able to feel the sublime mood in your reverse doom anyway.
Loved this piece, CansaFis. The vibe, the mood, and the reflection on something close to home. This is a lesson to all writers: look around you, think a thought, and write about that. No need to revolutionize anything. Just write about what’s going on in your own world. Keep on rockin