there's no place like home

Just quick, because I need to hose myself down and go wander around outside without a heavy coat and socks and gloves and scarf: I came home to San Francisco last night. I don't know how long I'll be here. A visit to the oncologist just before I left Detroit revealed that the last round of chemo/radiation doesn't seem to have helped; there are more lesions in his brain and his lungs. But he's not more symptomatic, and Mom tells me she can hold down the fort, so I'm going to stay here for a little while and hustle up work and hang out with my peeps (a word I know sounds totally silly out of me, but I love the image of those little marshmallow chicks).

I am a little frightened by how badly I needed to be back. AX, who met me at the BART station and helped me wrangle my luggage, told me about a fictional hero adapted by aliens to be more suited to urban life. So thoroughly adapted, in fact, that when Jake gets away from a city, he starts to feel sick. I could believe it, walking through the Tenderloin and trying to open my pores up to take in as much SF as I could. Is it possible this is the city I will live in to the end of my days? Because I start fading away at the edges if I'm gone for any length of time? I never felt this way about Detroit, or Minneapolis/St. Paul, as much as I liked the latter.

But this is what it's like. We dropped off my stuff at my studio at about 10:30 last night, and out on the sidewalk, two chefs I know from work were walking home from a big job a few blocks away at the Regency. So we went over there, snuck into the kitchen through the back door, and la voila, a bunch of the people I care about, wearing radio headsets and tuxedoes and closing down a party for 2,000 cryptographers. AX and I sat on a stack of folded tables and ate cold Chinese food while people whirled in and out with platters of food, buckets of ice, bags full of wadded-up tablecloths. People recognized him and hugged me; promises were made of phone calls forthcoming, and I just felt a lot better.