Fin de Siecle

Friday night I went to a friend's retirement party, she's leaving her job and the City for a new life somewhere else. I mention it because when I first moved here we were roommates, she was renting a beautiful Victorian in the Haight, and I rented a room there, along with a bunch of other long haired freaky type people. She was responsible for the place, and the only one with a job.

I was year out of the USMC, not yet two years back in the USA, having lived that time in Orange County, so San Francisco was a new life for me. I liked being in a City again, the house and people were very cool, I moved right into a situation that had been going on for a few years and there were lots of people and spin offs that I became part of just because I was a roommate.

But the bloom was off the Haight in 1971, and while it still hadn't become what it would, it wasn't once what it had been, but it was another beginning for me, and in a sense now that part is coming to an end. I managed to get together with her and a few more roommates again on Saturday in Chinatown for what will probably be the last time we'll be able to get together.

So she's leaving the City at the time my job is ending, I'm reaching for some kind of meaning here. There's lots of cycles in time, in a life, and I feel this must be one of them. A few years ago I became intrigued with the Mayan calendar, there are many cycles to it, each a part of another cycle, gears turning gears, wheels spinning within wheels. I gotta believe that somewhere in the spin there's a still place, where I can find neutral.

I have a very real physical sense of fin de siecle right now, lots of circles closing, completion, resolution, balance, harmony and reckoning.