This poem was in the last issue of the New Yorker. I’ve read it every morning for a week, and it haunts me. Her name and dates seem part of the poem.

Last year I got a note from a guy who had found this website because he had googled Wanderly Wagon, an Irish kids’ television programme from the 1970s. He lived in San Francisco, he said, and now that he had a pair of American toddlers he felt nostalgic for stuff he would never get to share with them. I thanked him for writing. A few days later, I got another email. He had read more of my pieces, and we had grown up in the same area at roughly the same time. Did we know each other?

We did, barely. John was four years ahead of me in school, and, helped by a photo, I dredged up hazy memories of him as one the Sixth Year guitar guys. He couldn’t picture me, but that was understandable; my school friends were his friends’ little sisters. I remembered his house. We swapped memories of tortured school orchestra practices; of each of his teenage girlfriends; of housing-estate gossip from mid-eighties.

If you’re ever in San Francisco, he said, look us up. His American wife loved the coincidences that Irish people keep bumping into.

A few months later, Stone Yamashita invited me out for a job interview. I agreed to spend a weekend, though I didn’t see how San Francisco could win my heart from Brooklyn even in the dead of winter. When I told John I was coming, he decided that I should get to know some locals. He and Natasha would bring me along to a friend’s party that Saturday night.

Sometimes you meet people and realize you’re already soul-friends, and only the details need to be unpacked. I put myself up for adoption as soon as I met their little family that afternoon. Natasha, John’s wife, is more attuned to Irish culture than any non-resident American I’d ever met, and has the spooky recall of an outstanding listener. In their local coffee shop, she told me how my secondary school class were doing.
“Now, do you know John’s pal Brian Roche?” she’d say.
“Vaguely. I was friendly with his sister.”
“Suzanne? She’s super-nice. You know she broke up with Alan last year, right? Those guys had been going out a long time…”

They asked about the job interview. “You probably wouldn’t have heard of them,” I said. “It’s a small strategic consulting firm, and I’m not entirely sure yet what that means.” They looked at each other and laughed. Natasha had worked with half the Stone Yamashita staff in various past lives. The party they had invited me to that night was hosted by one of them. In disbelief I pulled out the list of ten people who were lined up to interview me, and she checked them off. Some would be at the party. So would John’s friends from our hometown, whom I’d probably know.

At the party, in this familiarly strange city, my past and future strolled through dim rooms. Over one shoulder, I swapped school memories I thought I’d forgotten. Over the other, I collected impressions for a mysterious interview. It was soothing and unsettling at once.

The next morning I stopped at a cafe on a stroll through the Mission.
“Can I have a large latte?”
“Oh, you mean an I Feel Whole? Or an I Feel Pure?”
Too late, I realized I was in the heart of vegan San Francisco, which is not the place for a caffeine/dairy fix, and I was about to walk out when I heard my name. It was a guy I had last seen on a beach in Thailand, when we did a bizarre seven-day fast together almost three years ago. Bryan was a raw-foodist now, and this was one of the few places he could eat out. When I’d met him he was a software engineer, but since then he had become a reiki practitioner. It was wonderful to experience my energy, he said.

I told him about the dreamlike party the night before, and the Monday interview.
“Oh,” he said, “I used to sit next to Keith Yamashita at Apple nearly twenty years ago. You’ll have a good time there.”

It was the first time I understood that this city is as small as Dublin, and bumps into itself just as much, or more. Instead of waking up, I moved here.

My friends at Meetup have had a rocky week. Nobody likes to be told that they have to pay for something that used to be free, and I’m especially sympathetic to organizers who already feel like they’re working hard to run their Meetup Groups. It’s a tough service to charge for. Nevertheless, I’m counting on my old team to weather this. We need what Meetup provides more than we realize.

Scott, the founder, has always done a great job of starting conversations with smart people, and one of my favorite parts of working there was the chance to hear their thoughts. In an iWorld, there are few services that push people to form community groups the old-fashioned way—face-to-face. It’s so rare that it drew people like Esther Dyson, Pierre Omidyar from eBay, and Senator Bill Bradley, each of whom patiently coached our young company (and continues to). Every few months, Clay Shirky, Steven Johnson, Doug Rushkoff and others would gather in the Meetup lounge—on inflated, furry chairs—and share their work on the behavior of groups, the future of community organizations, or social networking.

Robert Putnam gave the most interesting talk. He’s the Harvard sociologist who wrote Bowling Alone, a book Americans hadn’t known they wanted to read. Chart by chart, statistic by statistic, Professor Putnam patiently mapped the decades-long decline in community participation in this country, which had once been such a nation of joiners. The slice of the country that still reads books looked up from TVs and computer screens and read his headlines.

The news was that Meetups save lives.

Social capital: it’s who you know, not what you know. (But you knew that.) Your contacts determine more about your career success and your earning potential than your academic achievements. The best predictor of low crime rates in a neighborhood is not income, or education levels, or cops on the street, but the number of neighbors who know each others’ first names. If you are socially isolated, it shortens your life expectancy as much as smoking does (so the smoking groups who huddle outside Manhattan and Dublin bars probably come out even.) Every ten minutes added to your daily commute cuts your social capital by ten per cent.

But joining a group—any group—cuts your risk of dying prematurely this year in half. Half!

Year on year, since a high in the early Sixties, every form of participation in American life has declined. That means card-carrying memberships, church attendance, and volunteerism, but it also means the habit of entertaining friends at home, or going for picnics, or taking part in a sports league. Forty years ago, Americans reported that they went to five picnics a year. Now it’s two. (I went to two picnics in Prospect Park last year. After each of them I gushed about wanting to do it every week. But I didn’t.)

Professor Putnam showed a graph of the number of people who agreed with the statement “Most people are trustworthy.” By the 1990s, it looked like it was hurling itself off a cliff.

It’s both relaxing and exhilarating to sit with a great teacher or a great novel. You sense that they are taking you somewhere new, and you trust them to bring you along. The real lesson Professor Putnam brought for us was that this gloomy state wasn’t new. It had happened before, almost exactly a hundred years ago, when mass mechanization separated people from their families, sent them to cities, and caused the existing institutions to falter. In a response to modernity almost as energetic as Ulysses, Americans invented a huge number of the community associations we recognize today. The Boy Scouts. The PTA The Rotarians, Elks, Kiwanis, and Toastmasters. The Little League. All were artificial inventions, over a fifteen-year span. Today, Professor Putnam studies Meetups to find out if they might come to fall into the same category.

Here’s my own modest theory. It took us a few decades after the car and the TV ruled our lives to realize that being sedentary made us depressed and shortened our lives. The first joggers looked crazy—where are you going in such a hurry? But then Nike showed us the waffle-soled shoe. The strange notion of “health clubs“ was slowly accepted. We invented machines that resisted our muscles as well as farm tools once had. Jane Fonda helped the home video industry almost as much as pornography. These days, this entirely invented need has become a bazillion-dollar global fitness industry.

We may dread a gym session, but we know it’s good for us. So we set aside the forty minutes three times a week, and hope for the glow of reward. As artificial as a Meetup can feel—and I confess it never felt anything other than weird to me to meet a bunch of strangers in a public place—it may be part of a related wave of orchestrated engagement. We may start scheduling efficient bursts of human contact, so that we can stay mentally healthy enough to get back to the glowing screens that really call us. Our primate brains seem to need a social workout—so why not a social gym?

Out here I can keep a full social calendar on the visits of New Yorkers alone. I know my friend Jake only as a Brooklynite, but he comes from Marin County across the San Francisco bay, so I now get to see him on family visits. Yesterday he and his sweetheart, Kit, were at Mission-Dolores Park.

Like the rest of the city, the park is pretty: a shallow bowl lined with palm trees. Good-looking people sprawl on the grass, lying low under the San Francisco wind. And dogs, dogs everywhere, running off leash and sniffing backsides. Well-loved city dogs seem to have a better time than their suburban cousins.

A lemonade robot arrived, outfitted in painted boxes from head to feet. He lumbered through the park, cardboard arms out, selling drinks. The dogs went wild at the sight of this creature. Arf! Arf! Arf! Arf! They circled him and barked, looked at each other for further instructions, circled and barked again. Retrievers, border collies, handsome boxers, and dobermans chased like kites while their owners watched. The lemonade robot didn’t seem to mind, though it was hard to tell from his cardboard face.

Below us, a toffee-colored setter finally escaped the owner who thwarted her. She shivered as she drew near the mud puddle, then bellied into it, rolling until she was fully coated. Out she stepped, shaking off a fine spray of liquid mud, then rubbed herself into the grass and groaned. A melted-chocolate tail flapped in joy. We clapped the beauty of her canine spirit, knowing we didn’t have to scrub her clean.

“In New York I’m so used to dogs wearing clothes that these dogs look kind of…naked,” said Kit, as a wheezy pug wearing only a collar pushed his way into our circle. Jake’s San Francisco brother was puzzled. Sweaters for the cold? “It started off that way. But now it’s more a fashion thing. They wear clothes all year round. You even see them with these big Elizabethan ruffs. And jewelry. And nail polish.” We agreed that these edenic San Francisco dogs looked indecent.

A guy approached with a clipboard, asking for a few minutes to explain a petition to raise taxes for school funding. None of us wanted to listen. “We’re not residents,” Jake said eventually, and the petitioner shuffled off to the next refusal.

He was in the wrong park. A few weeks before I’d read a New York Times piece about how U.S. cities feared they would go the way of San Francisco—chic and childless. I hadn’t quite believed it. Most of my San Francisco friends have kids, as do many of my co-workers. Bernal Heights crawls with children—it’s one of the reasons why I moved there. I’m not happy in neighborhoods where ages, complexions, and paychecks range narrowly.

But there are more dogs in San Francisco than there are people under eighteen. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Mission-Dolores Park on a sunny Saturday afternoon, where hundreds of sleek puppies had the run of the place, and only a few dozen toddlers—mostly Mexican and Asian—played on the swings. In Prospect Park, we would have heard shrieks and whoops; out here, only barks and yips. The city has trouble getting families to stay, and this says bleak things about its future.

We watched a heavily-pregnant woman walk past the mud puddle, her belly button pointing the way. How strange she looked; a mammal in the land of robots.

POSTSCRIPT: it’s evening now, and I’m just back from a rowdy birthday party for a three-year-old friend. I’m cheerfully eating my words, along with slobber-covered cupcakes.

In Bernal Heights, an idyllic little enclave of quaint eats and progressive thinking, you’re practically required to have a dog. Or a kid. (Unless you’re a lesbian with a cat. And maybe even then.)—BlackBook 2005 San Francisco Guide

In the Cortland Street stores you can buy a rainbow of t-shirts that say “Bernal!” or “Bernal Baby.” The designs are identical to the “Bklyn!” slogans Manhattan people wear once we roll across the bridge in our covered U-Hauls. Those were little messages directed to the ones we’d left behind but still had to visit for brunch. I know you don’t understand yet that Brooklyn is cool, our borough shout-outs said, but perhaps our t-shirt pride will convince you. To those who’d lived in Brooklyn all along—by which we meant four years—-we hoped they said, I belong, too!

Bernal is a tiny, earnest Brooklyn. My local coffee shop is called “Progressive Grounds,” and it’s as fine a place as any for a morning with the Economist. On the noticeboard you can collect phone numbers for local plumbers, feng shui practitioners, rolfers, writing teachers, tree doctors, and body-focused psychotherapists.

Where the highways coil together at the bottom of the hill, there’s an excellent farmers market. Half the price, I’m told, that the fancy people pay at the Embarcadero market. Even when my sorrel experiment turns into bitter black slime, I have the comfort of knowing it was only a dollar, and she threw in the dandelion greens for free.

I moved from Prospect Heights to Bernal Heights, but Brooklyn’s gentle slopes are puny next to San Francisco. I have push my bike up the last two blocks to my apartment, wheezing. The hills are so steep that we walk down like drunken mimes, knees bent, toes pointing delicately. Hills rear in every direction, so that on my four-block walk to the coffee shop, I stagger up for a block, down for two, and back up. I worry about the snow and ice that won’t arrive.

The compensation is a view that makes me trot to the picture window every morning. I stare at it like a cat, watching the city roll from Twin Peaks to the Marin Headlands. It never stays the same.

I live in Bernal. By choice.

My version of Microsoft Word autocorrects “friends” as “Friendster”.
How depressing.

I’m learning a new language, with a one-word vocabulary. In California, everything is organic, down to the bottled water they fly in from New Zealand. Organic oats Organic cayenne pepper. Organic cotton cleansing pads. Organic jicama. “Is it or-gan-ic?” they ask in restaurants, even when the menu is bloated with the word. After New York City’s grubby bodegas, where a Slim Jim cost as much as a pallet of strawberries here, I am round-eyed at this west coast feast. (The proof: I’ve put on five pounds in five weeks.)

I’m glad that I’m rich enough to afford gently-reared food, even if it’s fertilized by the bullshit of fussy white people. I love the Bernal Heights Farmer’s Market on Saturday mornings. The pro-dooce, as they call fruit and vegetables in this country, tastes wonderful. Still, the prissiness of it all makes me want to lick an oil tanker.

In the Trader Joe’s parking lot I stuff the saddlebags of my little bike while all around me people load up their armored vehicles with well-travelled organic artichokes and Eurotrash water. Their bodies are well-cared for, but the planet is still battered.

For the last six months or so, I’ve reached for my notebook as soon as I wake up and written three pages, longhand. It’s whatever comes into my sleepy head—whacked-out dreams, whining, to-do lists, memories, private arguments, stories people tell me.

At dinner last week, Tim Bray asked why I don’t write much any more. (Tim is one of my first and favorite mentors, and I was glad to meet him after three years of quick notes.) I gave him the rehearsed excuses. I’m a slow writer; a tweaker who frets about my adjective allowance. My essays are getting too long for a blog. I’m busy with a new apartment, new city, new coast, new job. This to a man with a family and a big fat two-city job, who turns out screens of clear prose a day and answers email in ten minutes.

Then told him about the three or four pages I write every morning. “Wow, that’s odd,” he said politely. (He’s Canadian.)

God, I suppose it is. So Thursday night I dragged out those notebooks and re-read them for the first time. 180 days times three pages adds up. I feared a self-pitying loop through Woman’s Search for Meaning, but was surprised at the number of cheerful squibs and fragments that I would once have put here. They were dotted with growls about my twelve-year-old neighbor’s hollering, or more goddamn snow out there, but they were mostly readable. Or at least legible.

So this is an experiment. For a few days I’m going to put sleepiest first-thing-in-the-morning squibs up here, with a half-hour time limit, and see how they turn out. Sure, isn’t that what blogging is all about?

But no outtakes from the Bad Sex With World Leaders dream cycle, I promise. My subconscious may be power-crazed, but I’m not.

My blog comments have been broken for a week, and I don’t know how to fix them. This makes me sad. Spammers had already made me close comments on old entries, and I miss the random stuff that used to come in from people stumbling on old posts through Google searches. Until I reinstall Movable Type, you can always email me instead. dervala [at] dervala [dot] net.

When Elvis sings “I’m just a hunk, a hunk of burnin’ love,” I’m ready to sign up for U.S. citizenship right then and there. Only a country of genius could produce that kind of art. Nevertheless, America needs to get out more. Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist , has recently discovered that the world is flat, that Indians are smart, and that other countries have workers and telecommunications infrastructures as sophisticated as the homeland’s. Perhaps we foreigners can even produce glib essays for a tenth of Friedman’s wages (as long as you pay us in Euros).

Eight years ago I shared H1-b visa gripes with Indian engineers in Times Square, while we worked to fix bugs with the Hyderabad colleagues who lived twelve hours in the future. The older IIT engineers, who had gone to graduate school in the US, acted as cultural brokers for the delegations that went back and forth between Hyderabad and Broadway. We could have told Friedman what was coming, if we’d been at the right cocktail parties.

Gokul, my colleague and running partner then, went on to MIT graduate school and now runs Google’s AdSense program. We’re neighbors again, in a region where fully a third of start-ups were founded by immigrants, including Google. Eight years on, at a time when USCIS has made it much harder to come here, we could now do just fine or better where we came from. The next generation of Gokuls can start their empires at home, and that’s why the US Ambassador to Ireland has had to tour the universities to beg Irish students to take up summer visas to visit the US. They’re not interested.