New Horizons

Eighteen years ago, I came to San Francisco looking for adventure and new horizons. Including a brief summer tour of Europe in 1999, I've spent those eighteen years discovering interesting people and ideas I would never otherwise have known.

Engaging in the successful rent-control battle of 2000, and the unsuccessful fight to save New College in 2007, I got to know the City of Love in ways perhaps most new-comers don't. Watching the massive march against war in 2003 from the steps of City Hall--where in 2006 four thousand gay and lesbian marriages were performed by Mayor Gavin Newsom--stirred my imagination in ways that only San Francisco can.

Dining in a French restaurant with my new friends from Hong Kong and Shanghai in 2008, I listened to a native San Franciscan recount growing up in The Mission in the 1930s, when the district was home to mostly Irish-Americans. Whatever one might say about Fog City, it's never boring, and it's the place I consider home.

One of the interesting people I discovered in 2002 is San Francisco artist and photographer Mark Gould, who was the internet portal developer at New College of California when I was attending graduate school there. Mark had a long career in broadcast news and journalism, and spends his time helping writers like myself understand such esoteric knowledge as semiotics and typography, which are fundamental to comprehending the art of media.

Over the thirteen years I lived in Marin (on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge), Mark and I met at cafes in The Mission, Haight-Ashbury, Marina, and Russian Hill to discuss developments in communication, consciousness and social engineering in the US. Now that we are both retired, we manage to keep our hand in with projects like Medium and INSiGHT Journal.