I’ve just moved.

Not just houses, but cities and entire lives. It’s exciting and new, a bit like the theme song from the Love Boat, but with no Gopher, no dancing girls and no stopover in Rio.

Bummer!

For posterity’s sake I kept a bit of a journal of my first week in San Francisco and have decided to share it as a peek into the inner sanctum of my life. I’d call you all voyeurs for reading, but in actuality I’m just a hideous narcissist who wants to show you photos of my closet.

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ST. AUGUSTINE, FL-

I’ve spent most of my life in big cities. Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco. And for some reason, I’ve always felt safe. I’m not sure why, because I’ve lived in some unsavory places. I’ve rented apartments in neighborhoods that people with college educations tend to avoid - neighborhoods populated by surly hookers who won’t take no for an answer and guys with swastikas carved into their necks and elderly women suffering from night terrors and a seething hatred of “negrahs”. But I never felt like any of them would ever kick down my door or accost me as I waited for the bus. They were just local color, and if you caught them at their creative peaks, pretty damn entertaining. Spend a leisurely Sunday morning at your local slum diner, munching on a rubbery omelet and listening to a man with an eyepatch explain to his waitress how the mayor is spending our tax dollars to create a doomsday laser, and you suddenly remember why you never bothered to get cable.

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Interstate-10

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GRAND BLANC, MI-

In a word, inequity. As capitalism continues running amok like a rabid dog, I simply cannot take one day longer without a plan for escape, my fingers caked with mud from the tunneling. While a Democrat may very well become president, he or she will inherit more problems than Bush inherited wealth. That only makes sense, for Bush certainly wouldn’t favor distributing the only thing of which he has an abundance, that being wealth. Still, months to go before I sleep and my awakening in a land that, at this time, I care not to disclose.

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THE QUEEN CITY, NC-

My neighbors like to party. They just moved in around a month ago. I saw their house being built. My dog used to shit where their house now stands. So did a few other dogs. There was nothing but woods. Tons of trees. Hawks and croaking frogs. Deer and raccoon tracks pressed in the dirt.

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GRAND BLANC, MI-

Forget Christmas and the rest of the holidays for a moment, or at least put aside the idea these dates coincide with this post. They have nothing to do with this post. I am on to something else. And that is…

…What are you doing right now? When I say you, I include me. It’s a thin line. Are you anticipating tomorrow, next week, next year? Are you remembering twenty years ago, ten, five? Is there a kind of film playing in your mind, in which somehow all these strands — now, tomorrow, yesterday — play at once, in the dark or light, bereft of parents or your own parental mind and its nagging? 
 

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THE QUEEN CITY, NC-

I’ve worked many jobs. I’ve pushed a broom through a supermarket. I’ve sold shoes. I’ve poured booze to old men and young men with the shakes. I was an English teacher.

But I’ve never been a porn star like Nick Manning.

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By Rich Ferguson 

LOS ANGELES, CA-

Picture the scene.

It was the early 90’s.

REM was singing about losing their religion.

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GRAND BLANC, MI-

I am moving to Florida; Sanibel, Florida, to be exact, an island just west of Fort Meyers. Robert Rauschenberg and (how’s this for contrast) Dan Brown live on the adjacent island of Captiva. Several other known writers live there, too, like Barbara Kingsolver. Luckily, it’s not the home of Dave Barry. “Count your blessings,” they say. One.

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GRAND BLANC, MI-

Lately, I feel like a Student Mover with “Sisyphus” on my label, only I’m not rolling a rock up a mountain but building a mountain…for Student Movers. What shit I buy when bored; only my taste in books bears well the poor judgment of my shopping sprees. A few of the DVDs reveal true mental disturbances: Candide, the Musical? I’ve never even opened it. And then there’s the appliances, like the juicer; it juices, all right: me. It’s a tube-free enema.

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SAN FRANCISCO, CA-

My mother was never very good at teaching me politeness, but I’m sure someone else’s mother tried to (and lord knows I spent more time with other people’s mothers than I did with my own). I’m only okay at nice. Maybe a C- or something, just enough to be able to take me out in public without constantly having to keep an eye on me for fear I’ll offend your new friends/colleagues/business associates. That flimsy effort at “niceness” has been very difficult to keep up this past year since moving to a town I just don’t like.

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CHARLOTTE, NC-

It was sometime in the early 90s when I first heard about them.

At the time I was playing in a metal band, working a dreadful manager gig, and dating a girl that I didn’t like the way you’re supposed to like a girl.

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SAN FRANCISCO, CA-

(Most place names have been withheld, bastardized or totally made up to protect the innocent, the addicted, the ashamed, and mostly me.)

Many writers are married to the landscapes of their youths. You can’t take the humid, race-embattled south out of many a Southerner’s writing, for instance. Writers like J.M. Coetzee and Lynn Freed’s books are set in their childhood homes of South Africa, full of jacaranda flowers, humid air and the tinge of apartheid. Even Stephen King reinvents his lush and creepy Maine, revealing how deeply infused the state is in his bones. I, however, never really thought about “my” place much, until it was time to leave it (which I did NOT do at the appropriate “leaving for college” stage).

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MONROE, NC-

As of late, a lot of my time has been spent on the road. In the last three weeks I’ve been to many cities and towns for the first time since I moved to North Carolina two years ago. Indian Trails. Wingate. Mint Hill. Marvin. Stallings. Weddington. Waxhaw.

Small towns sprouting out of the thick woods. Big-time commercial construction. Million-dollar homes. Homes that don’t cost so much. Huge residential spreads bringing in people from California, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Minnesota.

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NEW YORK CITY-

The economy in New York City in early 2003 was in shambles and it was nearly impossible to land a job.

This was especially true if you had no skills, qualifications, direction, or desire to work.

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