I wake up in Oakland, in an old house with many rooms and a deep porch, and remember this and that. Memory is duration, time upon time, time within time, time through time, which cinema mimics. Like the pupil of an eye adjusting to the degree of light, memory expands and contracts with the spirit's muscle, a smile's flicker, an accent's grain. The re-animation of this or that event.

So that when I walk in the streets of Oakland, I see not only the city but a movie, a movie that cannot burn or decay like celluloid. Every city is similar in this sense: a composite of countless private movies whirring in the darkness of minds re-perceiving not only themselves, but other bodies, other places, other times.

...

On the porch we sip chai and discuss life's pin-turns. Like we used to, on a sunny porch on Durant in summertime Berkeley, when we were 21 and 22, when our minds didn't turn to husbands, babies, mortgages. What distinguishes us from girls, I suppose.

Today I type on a lime-green couch in a cluttered living room in Berkeley, rubbing the pop and crack of firecrackers out of my eyes. All my cells tremble with potential. Osmosis, generation, decay.

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