After nearly a week in San Francisco, there is much to consider. Strangely enough, I came across the last Urbane Studies column I wrote for SFist.com tonight, while getting together some old files. 

I suppose I would have liked to have rewritten it, the beginning seeming to have come out breathlessly impatient to tell some truth. And so it is, the latter part of it speaks a truth that is as close as I probably ever came to what I wanted to say about how I felt about having loved and lived in that great city, only to learn that I needed to leave it. 

Writing is dissimulation, and even when I said what I meant, I relied on the complicity of a wordy disguise. Few I worked with knew what I did, and still fewer know as time and distance multiply. After my own fashion, I don’t often re-read what I’ve done, but I want to know that it still means what I meant it to mean.
What else can you hope for, if you’re writing your way out of town?

This is, as ever, the Ouroboros: go to the end to find my beginning.