Smells Like Old Noodles

An ode to San Francisco

I’ve just had a bath but somehow still smell like old noodles. Maybe its my sweater. Clean……but, you know, vintage. My hair does sorta look like a Ramen noodles/ Justin Timberlake meme, so its possible the effect is psychological.

Noodlin’ with Dan Flavin at the SFMOMA

Anyway, I’m barely back home in Utah after photographing three families and making sure to see some friends in the Bay Area.

Whatever traces of winter hibernation I had left on me melted off there. Whatever soul malaise I'd been carrying around shook out like a dog drying off not caring who got caught in the spray.

I’ve been a crooked version of myself lately, but San Francisco set me straight. Which is a funny sentence to write about a swirling, queer city - hovering like an ephemeral painting along side sand and sea.

Helen Frankenthaler

To go to San Francisco is to be inside of something. Maybe a mist, maybe a tech bubble, maybe a movement for love spun decades ago and a movement for love spinning its shape out from under the heaviness now.

Whatever the inside of that something is, it's shining. It shines pink in pockets plus gold at the center. Silver along the city’s lips which curl like ocean waves and time.

Of course there is the dirt too. Which is the only way you can trust any of it. Dirt in the faces of the people and on the sparkle sidewalks, around every growing flower, and stuck between the wide boards of homes, which are old and holding secrets we can't afford to forget.

Yayoi Kusama

In San Francisco, I feel more beautiful. Not because I am but because my gaze dances from delight to delight, from mythic tree to shimmering sunlight, from selected color to symbols reinvented. This dance of eye recalibrates me from the inside out, as if pressing buttons to a code only my soul knows, thus reconfiguring my outside beauty to something as refreshing as it is exhilarating, as it is noodle-esque as it is familiar.

In San Francisco, not once do I think to ask, does this make sense? Because it's not supposed to. It doesn't have to. It makes the sense of a strange song sung many times over many centuries by many voices reaching every note.

In San Francisco my hips are an infinity sign moving away from a lover who has left and toward another lover on the way, as the self and all that I am stays center. Stays still. Stays safe. Stays sweet.

Joan Mitchell

In San Francisco there is a bridge they call the Golden Gate. I hated hearing about gates such as these in church, but this golden gate makes me swear I see angels. They just look different. Really different. Their wings remain hidden or else they only reveal themselves mid-flight or mid-fall. The bridge takes my breath away every time I drive across it which is usually exactly once per trip.

In San Francisco you can’t leave anything in your car. Its a real stealy place. But you can fall asleep with the windows cracked and an eye half open. You can wake up just in time to walk a long time on the beach listening to one of your favorite writers of all time, Lidia Yuknavitch narrate her new memoir through your phone. It will make you cry and make you growl and make you remember how much poetic, bold, and crass language makes you feel transcendant.

In San Francisco there are smells I ask everyone about but no one can name. Maybe the eucalyptus, maybe the shrubs, maybe your imagination calling you home with a memory that's not even your own.

Its definitely not old noodles.

xx,

Yan