I Cover the Waterfront: February 2011

Why I Write

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.

Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth.

Here at last he finds rest.

—from The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham, 1919

It is our petite Vieux Carré, our sunny Marseille, a catchment holding more than the Port of Oakland it cradles the beloved margins, the narrowest, antipodal feet of the human bell curve on which the mass of every conceivable human securely rests: the artists, vagabonds, authors, entrepreneurs, hucksters, dopers, prostitutes, sailors, dispossessed, drag queens, misbegotten, chefs, brewers, musicians, politicians, the wealthy and destitute; haunted by the ghosts of Tennessee Williams, Edith Piaf, Hart Crane, and Toulouse-Lautrec.

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Sunday, February 6, 2011

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