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This is a quintessentially Pacifica day. The fog is thick and drippy, the ground is soaked with mist. From my apartment I can hear both the freeway and the ocean waves. Sometimes it’s hard to discern if the roaring sounds are an 18-wheeler bearing down the steep, southward side of Highway 1 or if I hear the sea crashing into the cliff. Today, though, it’s a high surf advisory and the roaring is louder than usual, so it’s the ocean, the advance raging of a storm somewhere offshore.

—

I have one older cousin, the daughter of my mom’s only sister. We were close when we were little, because we lived in the same neighborhood, but she was always trouble and I knew this from the time I was 5 and she was 8. Nothing she’s ever done has made me change that opinion. She has made a series of choices in her life that have made chaotic her norm. Horrible choices in men and hard drugs chief among them. She has borne some serious tragedy not entirely of her own making, and one can only guess the genes her bipolar father left her with. Her birthday is 9/11 for gawdsakes.

She moved back to California a year or two ago, not far from me. I’ve stayed away, not wanting to get pulled into dysfunction not of my own making, frankly a bit scared of the types of people she surrounds herself with. I don’t know if we could be more different.

Now though, she has been diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer and she’s in an unsafe living environment and I live closer to her than any other family. She doesn’t have dependable friends. She can’t even keep up with a cell phone bill. So now of course I have to cease the escapism. This is giving me mixed feelings along the lines of,

“your cousin has to get cancer before you’ll bother to get mixed up in her life?”
“how bad is this going to drag me down?”
“I wonder how psycho the current boyfriend is and if he’s going to make this incredibly difficult?”
“is she on crack again?” 
“will she even take my help?” 
“what if she doesn’t make it?” and 
“this is all making me kind of angry”.

—

I’m laying here now, trying to decide what’s a “normal” way to feel about all this. Is there a normal in these situations, or just a range of emotions and thoughts the full spectrum of the rainbow, or more likely shades of gray?

If I rub my eyes hard enough, my hands smell like cut onions, as if there’s some core layer of me that is all allium bulbs and home cooked meals, a mirepoix that seasons everything I know.

—

I just returned from a walk to the beach, down the newly constructed trail, built upon the edges of the crumbling cliff. I didn’t even see the surf, really. I mean, I saw the edges of a couple of waves, but I didn’t watch them form offshore, come crashing to the sand, as one who hasn’t seen the ocean in a time would probably do. How funny, to walk west to nearly the edge of the land and not really see the ocean. What I mostly saw was the fog, endless fog.

—

Yesterday was a perfectly sunny day, not even chilly as we walked from Powell BART past Union Square. There was an engineering luncheon, full of vultures (me among them), at the Sir Francis Drake hotel. The hotel is one of those SF gems of the post-earthquake ’20s. There were golden carved embellishments above every door and fanciful chairs snuck out of Wonderland. People used to dance in those halls. Later, at happy hour, we walked into the marble lobby of Bar Adagio. There, the brown leather chairs and bold, earth-toned paintings made me feel lucky, so lucky, to get to sneak into these beautiful places, to soak them in in an instant, to feel their texture painted into my story, whatever that story ends up being.