Berkeley Is Weird

I would have to take off my shoes to count the number of times in the past few weeks that I have been completely dumbfounded by shit that has happened in this city. I feel like almost once a day I am either stopped dead in my tracks or made to literally laugh out loud by something that I overheard or oversaw completely in passing. The other night, I went to the bodega down the street from my house, and upon entering, found that a borderline drunken woman was cursing out the clerk, saying some shit that would have made Mamet blush. The coup de grace of the tirade was, "You better put a skirt on 'cause you actin' like a bitch. Go put some pumps on, ho, and suck my dick motherfucker." I can’t make this shit up – nobody can really – and that’s the beauty of it. It’s raw, unrestricted human interaction in it’s truest form.

The problem is, I don’t even know where to begin in describing some of this stuff – I can only tell the same “I heard/saw a homeless man/woman say/do something really funny/sad” so many times. But that’s only the beginning. A lot of people will tell you that New York City is the place where you can do anything and not stand out, but I’ve been to New York, and that claim is false. There is a lot of crazy shit going on in NYC, and to be fair, their bars are (sadly) open much later than ours, but Berkeley is really the place to come for balls to the walls, unencumbered weirdness.

For example, the other night, as I was waiting downtown for the late Fremont train after seeing a movie with a friend, I happened to stumble into a conversation (I use “conversation” in it’s loosest sense) with a few girls from St. Mary’s college. The conversation started by virtue of the fact that they were drunk and had no idea how to get back to their school by train, and then centered on (drunkenly swerved around) how one of the girls was from Chicago and I was from Milwaukee (tri-staters have a bond in California), and we both like the Deftones. As a side note, apparently I don’t look like I just moved here because everyone asks me directions to places. Almost every time I take the train, someone asks me how to get to San Francisco. It’s unreal, because I don’t really live here, but I know the transit system better than people who do.

Regardless, midway through this conversation we were approached by a woman who, in addition to having the physical appearance of someone on the tail end of a weeks long meth binge, was clearly either blazed out of her mind or wasted on acid. Now, if you’ve ever been to NYC, you know that getting approached by anyone at a subway station let alone someone looking like the physical embodiment of slow death wearing a bed sheet for a skirt and hand painted sneakers would, at best, be received with a “go fuck yourself” and a halfhearted wave. But no. One of these girls actually summoned her over to ask about her shoes. When I used the words “hand painted,” I of course meant that they were splotched with fabric paint in a drug-addled haze, not actually painted with any semblance of clarity or meaning, but she asked nonetheless. The woman came over and talked for a minute – I don’t really remember what she said; I was too busy being stunned at how high she must have been – and after she left, the girl who started talking to her in the first place simply said, “Damn, she must’ve been smoking those trees. Like four or five of them.” I was laughing for days, and she just shrugged it off like that kind of shit happens every day. Which it basically does.

Moral? I don’t really know how to respond to Northern California. People have asked how I like it here and I never quite know how to respond. It can be such an all-encompassing question; I don’t really feel like I can address it in passing. “The weather’s gorgeous all the time, but everybody’s fucking psychotic” is usually what I end up saying, but that’s not necessarily all the way true. The best way of articulating this is that Berkeley – much more so than many other places I’ve lived – is a state of mind, rather than just simply a location. I just haven’t quite got the mindset down all the way yet…