Where are my background dancers?

Sometimes I sit alone in my room and I wonder what good is it? Maybe I should go to the cabaret? If only my life were a musical, so that when things like that happened someone would pop and start singing trite but catching musical numbers from the way back times, and constantly creating new songs for new periods of my life. What good is sitting alone in your room?

For the first real time since I moved to San Francisco, I feel like my life is coming together. I feel like i picked the wrong area to live in, that I settled for the first place I found in a decent neighborhood without really understanding what I was getting myself into. I was worried about finding an apartment in a single weekend. I should have lived in a furnished apartment for 1 month and then found a place to live. I should have lived near Mission. Except for 1 dinner out in my neighborhood with a friend and 2 of their friends, everything I have done or want to do is in Mission. (Cue slow music as I skip through my neighborhood, the shops and sushi restaurants as the fog rolls in. I sing about the local shops, the coffee, the Presidio and the golden gate. It's great, but it isn't me. I hold that note for a while, then the fog clears, the music swells, changes - probably something Latin infused, think Mingus' Tijuana Moods - and then I'm dancing through the streets of Mission, picking up fresh fruit, high fiving hipsters, eating mondongo and pupusas in a taqueria, hiding out in a dive bar smoking in the secret back rooms flouting the law like a renegade as the music slows, I walk out the back door, fog again, the ballad returns, the song ends.)

Regardless, I'm here in my neighborhood. Scene 2 begins. It involves a boy growing comfortable where he is at. So far, it is sort of making some friends but more of finding known friends in the area and moving out one of my best friends from somewhere else. Life begins to hit a routine. The music enforces this, maybe something semi-mechanical that repeats and repeats as my backup dancers troll our behind me doing activities representative of our daily repetition. They lay down, wake up, eat, commute, work, eat, work, eat, watch TV, sleep. That's a routine, will that become my routine? With friends, you begin to develop a routine. In one of those odd contrasts of our language, your routine might be not having a routine that is repeated but constantly avoiding routine can be your routine... I can't explain what i mean. As the dancers represent routine, I wander in and out of their routine, maybe this is modern dance actually, trying not to fall prey to the routine, trying to be me whoever that is, finding things to do besides the same bars and the same thoughts and the same experiences. Hit all the major artistic shows, return to the routing represented by the dancers, fight my way out and do something else original, fall back into the routine. The music is alternately repetitive and industrial and original and creative, depending on where I am in the process. You get the idea, as the 2nd scene fades to black.

Scene 3? Remains to be seen... In fact, scene two remains to be written. Right now, it's nothing but a fear or a thought or an intuition.

One of my best friends moved to the Bay Area, which is how we say we say San Francisco and the lesser areas nearby when we pretend that Oakland and those areas matter because in San Fran we have to pretend to give a shit about everything (which gets pretty damn annoying!). He and his wife stayed with me for less than a week, they found an apartment, and today we went shopping so they could have some basic furniture. It was nice living with them for a while, and makes me wonder if maybe I shouldn't consider roommates next time I move. I wonder what the music would be for that? Happiness, confusion, frustration, anger, joy - just like any friendship. Maybe that is scene 4, postscript, to be written in 1 year? Anyway, I was sad to leave them at their apartment today, but I was excited that largely because of them and 2 other reconnected local peace corps friends, I feel like my life is coming together. I now have 1 great friend to call in the area, to visit, to sit around and talk to and wander and drink coffee and daydream and wonder and just be myself with. That can develop, but it takes time. We already have time. I decided to move all my friends out here. The music swells, the plane lands and everyone I know dances off! We lock arms! We do the Rockette's kicks! We swim with the sea lions and hang off cable cars! We laugh and drink local beers! The music is happy, we are all happy, and we all live happily ever after. Just like in all the great musicals (except west side story maybe...).