Political climate change--A Writer and Publisher Statement

There's something sacred about anonymity; I'm not sure what it is but I think about it a lot, having several famous friends and knowing I wouldn't want to be one of them, knowing that what they give up I either couldn't give up or don't have in me to give in the first place.

I walk along Geary Boulevard this morning, beginning from my home on Anza down to 28th Avenue, then from 28th north to 16th and back again on the other side of the street, thinking about the blessing of anonymity, about not wanting to be known, and what this blessing might say, not only about me personally but also about the current political climate that seems so determinedly untrustworthy right now. I walk along thinking about my individual responsibilities as a citizen, and how I might act as a writer and publisher in the next few years, what kind of writing I might do myself and what kind of writing I might publish.

I now live in a community where I really am a minority; most of the people I walk along with on Geary or who are walking the opposite way, most of the people in the coffee shops and restaurants, the markets, flower shops, liquor stores, pharmacies I either enter or pass, are very different from me, ethnically, religously, perhaps even politically. How do I know they're different? I just know. I look different, I dress differently, I'm a white man and most of the people I walk past are not white.  I imagine that many were born in a country I was not born in, and know I am correct in this imagination by the look of their faces and the color of their skin. Many of them look like downright survivors, propped up by canes, hobbled by foot problems, walking as well as they can to appointments with doctors, acupuncturists, elderly clinics funded by the state of federal government. Many of the people I see are very old, but most of them are much younger than me.

While I'm walking on Geary I project, I'm afraid, a literary sensibility, either thinking it permits me a detachment that I imagine permits me to float both a little bit above and a little bit below the street on which I walk or accepting that it's simply the way I walk. The overwhelming majority of people I pass and who pass me seem sympathetic; they leave me alone and that's what I like. It almost seems that they're supportive of our differences, having been in the minority themselves. It seems to me that they know I don't want to be like them, and that I know they don't want to be like me, and that we can just go on with our walking. No matter how young or how old the people I see are, I imagine we've all reached a place in our lives where we're past all social evaluations and assigning of status.

It's kind of a dream, or at least mildly hallucinatory, walking along Geary Boulevard this way in the rain and the wind. Trash piles higher in the crosswalk gutters; objects sometimes appear there that I think attractive enough to take home, but don't. Walking along Geary I see civilizations collapse and reform themselves along religious, spiritual, temporal, hedonistic, epicurean and completely trivial, celebrity-based value systems. I see people who I believe believe in the absolute power of themselves and of their rulers, and people who believe in almost nothing, people who dye their hair blue, people with neck tattoos, older women formally dressed and younger women in yoga pants and flip-flops, men with purses and women with backpacks. I don't see the old guy with the Walt Whitman beard that I've often seen in the mornings at Lincoln Park because he sleeps there, and who spends his days sitting on the sidewalk at Geary and 20th with a dirty white Frisbee turned upside down in front of him--his unique nod to Buddhist monk begging bowls--to collect the coins of sympathetic passers-by. He isn't here this morning...I worry about him, where is he? Somewhere under the trees in Lincoln Park, beside the 6th fairway of the golf course, near the VA? The last time I saw him I bent down and gave him three dollars, all the cast I had; when he looked up at me, he looked me in the eye and thanked me. I told him to keep warm.

The farther I walk on Geary the more I know I don't want to be known, and that while I'm alive I'll never get to the end of knowing why I feel this way. I know that not being known is requisite for the kind of work I want to do as a writer and a publisher; anonymity is exactly the kind of freedom a true patriot of anything good and new and beautiful and truly creative could ever hope for. I'll write what I write and publish what I'll publish. And that's about all I know about it.