Continued from below: Given its history — drunken, rowdy, half-cocked — it should not be surprising that there are more AA meetings in SF than there are in Brooklyn, and that’s saying something. Not only can you get yourself a dose of program, if you’re down with that kind of thing, at nearly any hour of the day up to midnight, you can find one that might specialize in people like you. Not just drunks, Jewish drunks (the 12 Schleppers), recovering Deadheads (Wharfrats) and the motorcycle punks who make up the infamous Tuesday night meeting in the Mission, Boys Night Out.

I knew that this meeting was going to be slightly unorthodox when the opening statements were read to backtalk and cavils from the regulars there; instead of “higher power” one dude kept calling his higher power “vagina” (works for me) and some of the standard AA texts, like the excerpt from the Big Book chapter entitled How It Works, had been freely and obscenely adapted as well. The meeting never actually came to order but just when I thought things there might be too out of control for the first timer I had brought with me, a funny thing happened.

In order to speak, meeting members had to wear a plastic Viking helmet, complete with horns, and when these guys donned the ceremonial helmet people shut up and most of what the speakers said was more familiar. Reocovering drunks and junkies talked about how much better life was now that they weren’t living just for themselves, but cared about other people, and when it came to recite the serenity prayer at the end, even God got his due.

Her due, I should say.

Having lived in NY now as long as I lived in SF (16 years) I find my loyalties rather divided. For a long time after I went east and decided I liked it, I derided what seemed to be the predominant mood in SF: tiresome self-contentment flecked with liberal guilt. People in NY are generally too miserable to feel either contentment or guilt for too long, and that keeps the cycle on agitate here, with just enough lack of total disappointment to keep things from flooding over. Think of Wally Shawn’s definition of a good day in My Dinner with Andre (no cockroach in coffee cup) and you’ll get what I mean.

But on this trip west I felt a shift in my prejudices. Most of my old friends there confess to finding the city’s love affair with itself boring but they are proud of their priorities. No matter how rich some people in the Bay Area are (and the richest are some of the wealthiest in the world) everyone has had the experience of finding a meeting cancelled because it’s just too beautiful out. How many times has this happened to you in NY? It’s not exactly “Surf’s up!” (though the waves near Devil’s Slide have become the stuff of legend) but the impulse is the same: what could you possibly be doing that is more important than getting out into this beautiful day? All of nature has conspired to make your human plans seem petty.

That will keep your load in balance.

I took advantage of the break between semesters to go back to SF for a week. Heading west in the winter used to be a way of beating the cold but global warming (or “climate change,” as Republican pollster Frank Luntz wouild prefer) has set our continent on a bizarro-world path. The east coast is enjoying spring-like temperatures, as much as we enjoy anything here (most people I know are freaked out by the weather) while the Bay Area was reeling in the wake of thirty degree lows.

San Francisco itself looked especially empty on this trip; I was reminded of a trip we took to Paris after the deadly August heat wave three years ago. “Daddy,” my daughter said as we trooped through the vacated Rive Gauche, “do people actually live here?” In SF the question is not so much do people live there, since I saw plenty of live bodies in cafes and restaurants, but how do they live? With the priciest real estate this side of Hong Kong (NY is a relative land of bargains) I marvel at the midday cappucino sippers, tapping on their three thousand dollar laptops while the money trickles in… from somewhere.

Michael Moore groused about the same thing in his first film, the slightly specious documentary Roger and Me. He had been given the heave after a brief and ineffectual stint at Mother Jones and the bitter taste left in his mouth reminded him of dark roasted beans and the seeming slackers who enjoy them at any given hour in SF. He was fired essentially for not doing anything, while MoJo’s last editor, my old pal Russ Rymer, was sacked for doing too much. Over breakfast at that old North Beach standby, the Cafe Puccini, he told me that he knew the end was nigh when an overlord told him, “There’s nothing in the magazine that couldn’t have appeared in The Atlantic.”

And he didn’t mean it as a compliment.

While the question of how people live in SF remains on the table, one need only look out the window to get the why. The most spectacular new view in the city can be found at the top of new De Young Museum in the middle of Golden Gate Park. On a clear day you can see the city entire, more glorious than most of the funky Northern California art on display. My brother Ethan and I circled the observation deck and reveled in the sunlight and crisp colors before heading off for lunch at a Burmese restaurant. My sound track as I drove was the new album by the Red Hot Chili Peppers which also seems to grapple with the meaning of California. Those guys are all in recovery now which reminds me of a meeting I attended…

Cable news networks’ ratings boom during wartime (surely one of the reasons there weren’t that many hard questions asked at CNN et al in the buildup to the Iraq invasion) and small wonder: death doesn’t pause for commercial announcements, chaos needs to be witnessed live. Blink and you’ll miss the end of someone’s life.

State funerals, on the other hand, are like watching black paint dry and show up the shallowness of the newscasters more than scripted programs. (It’s hard to ad lib when you have nothing on your mind but your hair.) Gerald Ford may have wanted a simpler send-off than the one Reagan received (it’s hard to imagine one more spectacularly pompous) but that won’t stop cable news from treating it like a Leni Riefenstahl spectacle. By going through his old home of Alexandria and pausing at the House chamber, Ford probably hoped to keep it real, remind folks that he really was a man of the people — not a phony one, like the 43rd but an authentically ordinary guy.

Nothing ordinary about James Brown and his own funeral tour — the Apollo Theater yesterday, Augusta GA today — was meant to evoke his own remarkable life. When Ford died they could only think of one great quote from him — “Our long national nightmare is over” — while James dispensed more wisdom than the Tao: “Money won’t change you but time will knock you out,” he sang and who can forget the immortal words of “Superbad”: “Sometimes I feel so nice I wanna jump back and kiss myself.”

Too bad you couldn’t have seen your funeral, JB! When your widow got done singing “Hold On, I’m Coming” you would have thought she was going to jump in the casket with you. Michael Jackson was there, looking pretty dead himself, and the house band entertained the mourners with a redition of “Sex Machine” (you think they’re gonna play that at my funeral?). If Ford were to get into heaven he’d do it unostentiously, slipping in the side door. Al Sharpton asked St. Peter to “open the gates of heaven wide because James Brown likes a lot of room to swagger.”

Get on the good foot.

As if confused by the holidays, the Jesus of Wyckoff Street has rolled away the stone — or opened the glass door — to leave his phone booth sized home. The life-sized plaster statue of Christ crucified that for many years adorned the block of Wyckoff between Smith and Court streets has flown the coop, along with the owners of the brownstone He stood before.

There goes the neighborhood.

That was my old neighborhood and back in the day the long-suffering savior was a reminder that you were not in Manhattan anymore. Like the battle of the Christmas lights that occurred on First Place each holiday season, or the mobbed-up restaurant Marco Polo, the Wyckoff Jesus was a real slice of Italian Catholic whaddya-whaddya Brooklyn. When He went, He took some of Cobble Hill’s character with him.

There had been other signs of the Apocalypse in downtown Brooklyn of late; the pizza place at the corner of Warren got menus and booths and started charging $2 for a slice, and before that the Musician’s General Store went out of business clearing the way for another Starbucks, presumably.

Another former Hill dweller told me that the folks who owned the Jesus house finally sold out (no doubt pocketing a cool mil or more) and gave the Son of God the send off He deserved. A little parade escorted Christ to one of the nearby Catholic churches, one that has not been converted into apartments, where He will dwell forever and ever, amen.

Long after Heath and Michelle have moved on…

This morning our president received the much-anticipated Baker report on Iraq and declared it interesting. “It is a report that brings some really very interesting proposals, and we will take every proposal seriously and we will act in a timely fashion,” he declared of the much-anticipated bipartisan group-think product called “The Way Forward”, which sounds more like a forgotten Barbra Streisand-Robert Redford vehicle than a serious peace plan but that could be because Bush isn’t serious about peace. “I’m a war president,” he has insisted since 9.11 and his remarks constitute such a classic don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you blow-off that it’s hard to imagine any of the gentlemen on the committee waiting by the phone.

Much has already been made in the press of how much (or little) GWB would make of the Baker proposal, given his Oedipal relationship to Dad and all the Realists (fightin’ words to neocons) who served him. If there is one central image of our president that sums up his foreign policy it may be that of him trying to open a ceremonial door after leaving a stage in China last year. He made a comic face, probably not unlike the one he would make when the keg ran dry back at Yale,

He still thinks there is a secret door out of Iraq and that if he turns the handle we can exit — gracefully, even. Unfortunately he thinks the door is the same one he came in through when he got this party started. (Not the Grand Old Party; he ground that one to a halt.) Drunk on the fruit of his own nectar — “Come on everybody! Try some democracy! I’m driving!” — he is starting to realize no one else wants to boogie with him and it’s making him surly. In the words of Joe Walsh, “It’s hard to leave when you can’t find the door.”

Maybe saying one picture sums up this failed administration is unfair — there are so many to choose from. Some people still like “Mission: Accomplished” while a minority dig the box-on-the-back debate picture. (When in doubt, blame the tailor.) I’m starting to warm to a mental image, one conjured by Donald Rumsfeld’s eleventh hour memo, in which he says the Iraqis have to “pull up their socks.”

Aren’t you glad he left before one of his subordinates had to inform him that the men in Iraq don’t wear socks?