Trying to get back in step after feeling disconnected
Trying to get back in step after feeling disconnected Going there means feeling worried about whether or not I have the right Kombucha, the right accessories, the right FUD — it’s just too much trouble. There have been lots of arguments about space and access simmering, whether it’s the yummy mummies who want more sandboxes for their kids, the gay men who feel pushed out of their zone on the ridge, or the frustrated neighborhood kids who aren’t getting enough time on the basketball court. [...] when S.F. Rec and Park closed half of Dolores Park for renovations last year, the fence enclosures seemed representative of what was happening to the entire Mission. Dolores, like the neighborhood, was becoming gated, controlled, manicured, tamed and surveilled by outsiders who claimed to know what was best for the people who had always lived there. [...] the sun was shining, and everyone was in high spirits, from the boys on the basketball courts to the girls with their yoga mats. Silent dance parties have become all the rage in San Francisco over the past two years; they’re the natural result of a socially anxious generation and a city whose live music venues are all shutting down because the boring new neighbors don’t want any noise. On the headphones we were given, we could listen to one of two DJs or a radio station. “Maybe if I had a girlfriend, she could tell me which DJ to listen to,” he said, laughing but not really. Maybe if we were all listening to the same music, he could walk up to a girl and ask her what she thought of the song. On the way home from the park, I turned off on Mission Street and bought a Virgen de Guadalupe candle. Thursday was the day of Dolores Park’s partial reopening, but it was also the day after a massacre, and because nine people were killed in a South Carolina church, allegedly by a 21-year-old white man who had declared that black people deserve to be exterminated, I needed, rather desperately, to be around a few other people who were willing to declare the opposite.