Coyote on Divisadero

Re: world mammals: 96% of the world's biomass is now human and livestock, which means that just 4% is wild.

And there are now more dogs in San Francisco than children.

A friend of mine said he saw a coyote run across Divisadero Street the other day. For those of you not familiar with Divisadero Street, it is a what I would consider a major urban traffic artery that runs north to south in the city. The stretch of Divisidero where my friend saw the coyote is particularly urban, with restaurants, bars, clubs and at least one marijuana dispensary.

I happened to be walking along Divisadero the other day, not looking for the coyote but thinking for some reason about pop culture and my relatively new loathing of it. I used to be quite a consumer of pop culture, literally and figuratively pop culture played a major part in my life. Andy Warhol was my favorite painter then, and James Rosenquist my second favorite. The writing of Barry Yourgrau was important to me, and before Barry Yourgrau, Richard Brautigan. These artists and writers are all quite wonderful in their way, but ultimately none of them led me to anything I hadn't already seen or heard, which is as good a definition of pop culture as I can now come up with, even though I suppose I could make a case that it was High pop culture that appealed to me rather than Low pop; pop culture's really all the same in the way that a dog is a dog whether the dog's a Great Dane or an Irish Setter.

Walking along Divisadero I started counting the people who were using their 'devices' while walking: 7 of 10, or thereabouts, were on their iPhones or Androids or whatever they're called. It occured to me that had the coyote appeared along Divisadero at the time these people on their devices were walking along the street they might not have seen the coyote. These people were seeking different information, and who was I to question what they were seeking? Besides, others have written much better than I could ever hope to write about the distractions of technology and the new-fangled distribution methods of mass media...still it seemed kind of sad to me that so many people were consulting their devices while out in the urban wild.

Walking, I patted the front right pocket of my jeans to make sure my iPhone was there--it was, so I continued walking along Divisadero. As I walked I adjusted my thinking, from negative to positive: the iPhone is the summum bonum of pop culture, there simply couldn't be a greater achievement, the iPhone and its many competing manifestations have managed to encapsulate and express both the spirit and substance of pop culture to the degree that pop culture no longer needs expression; and the people using the these devices are hunter-gatherers in their own right.

I can't begin to say how good it felt to have this feeling, other than to say that I was able to see the world in a whole new light. It's perfectly ok to live in the Anthropocene Age, the world shaped almost exclusively by human beings; I could even be proud of where I am, released into a new wilderness beyond Pop culture where not even Post-modernism could harm me.