April 7, 2021:
Golden Gate Park became a constant in that period. Unemployed, isolated, struggling: I'd walk from Masonic to the beach and back, probably for the endorphin, day after day.
I remember sitting in a field, watching girls watch their dogs chase butterflies. Or finding myself at the beach without remembering how I got there. Or passing the Airplane's Fulton House, Blows Against the Empire in my head radio: "Last electric Sunday morning / waiting in the Park for the dawn..."
I wanted to be not home. To be not me, to be not there, to be not then. To turn it all back to before all of this happened. To be asleep, to be high, to be anywhere or anyone but me here now.
I see it, still, in the pictures a girlfriend took of me, probably a year or two years after the worst of it. Two years, probably. Although I'm smiling I'm still going through it.
To some degree I still am. Experiences like that change your brain chemistry, literally. I've never felt the sense of optimism and energy I knew before then. Nothing remotely close.
I wonder what it would be like, now, to wander the Park. Start at Masonic, drift to the beach and back. Are there pieces of myself I'd find still stuck to bushes?