The Collapse

I've been holed up in my friend's San Francisco studio for the past 36 hours listening to the new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah album - supplemented in regular intervals only by Bowie's Aladdin Sane -and I must say, despite the cable car bells that are like tiny ice picks to my cranium - especially at 6:00 am, and the fact that no matter how many times I shower and change I'm covered in cat hair five minutes later, and despite the fish smell that pervades every alleyway in Chinatown - and that yesterday I saw a half naked man running with a viking shield and helmut in the middle of Grant and Pacific asking 'what's in your wallet? what's in your wallet?' to apathetic 70 year old Chinese vegetable stand owners with silver teeth and gold rimmed sunglasses - and when the jogger passed I noticed he had his running shorts cut so his cheeks were just flapping in the foggy morning wind, and yet nobody seemed to care (not to mention that I think I saw the old man from The Golden Child who picked his nose and wiped it on his shirt before taking Eddie deep into the mountains of Tibet while I was scoring sugar donuts at 1:00 am), despite all this and more, listening to their album curled in the fetal position in this bohemian flophouse - with old typewriters and cameras and photos and paintings and bespeckled boxes with Grace Kelly magazine covers glued to the side, and my friend popping so many Zolofts and Lortabs that she became convinced earlier that the plane she saw from her back window was in fact a terrorist attack on the Transamerica building, despite everything - my brothers and sisters, the visions have been glorious.