San Diego overview – writing contest winner

san diego, lyrics: mr. history looks down on the city

i don’t want you to think san diego sounds funny. i don’t understand why the most powerful feeling this city evokes, at sunset, a sort of Grand Calm, never appears in any of my descriptions. let me try to capture it: with indeterminate vistas of lines, all flat perpendicular covered with soft shimmering air and a patina of indistinct sounds, the center city lies quiet. la jolla draws the jewels of attention to its exotic plants and stores, san diego is only as palpable as the curled light which rises from it, at night it dies, slowly. i want to qualify, but if i do it will turn trivial or sarcastic. the heirloom of a watering place at the end of the desert must be accounted. it isn’t the style, the taste, the accoutrements of trying to be happy in a city that must be described, but rather the fact that anything exists here at all, and the form that assertion takes, imposition on the land has settled, the dust has settled, it is superbly still. we breathe heavy, moist breath. i don’t even want to touch you. pale violet is the primary color, ice blue on its border. something is hot somewhere but not necessarily now, and the sun will be hot enough in the morning.

san diego lyrics: marcia kerwk looks across the city

no matter how beautiful, it’s awful. i firmly believe the pacific ocean turns people who don’t know how to live with it in toto into idiots. see that building, did you know the houses here are afraid of the outside and that’s why there are no windows, internal space must be created. the san diego wall lobby is stronger than the glass lobby, what can i say? the worst airport i’ve ever seen – all men and dolls –slum of slums, mile of cars, rotten this, rotten that, the wind blows everything that doesn’t have the sense to tie itself down into this dead sinkhole. the body gets up when the air dies down, puts white vinyl around its middle and on its end, and pretends it was just born. evil is the first exhibited trait, greed the second, innocence the third, sound like popes don’t they, and don’t call me a cynic. my vision is accurate. give me a street to describe and I’ll do a thorough job: the people, what they eat, where they go how much garbage they toss out, i would talk to them. i could move in, live there, write a thesis in anthropology: the melting pot or how the scum rises, and then fail to get a job and sort of never leave. then, when i’m about to die from skin cancer, you would get the objective description of your life: sad diego; i never came i never left. i could do all of this, but instead i chose to build my house here, overcoming the sadness with work; one direction all i know is, if i cannot find a way to live and work and love here, then i cannot hope to do so anywhere else. i know that sounds like it couldn’t be true, why not fly away you say, set up shop in another state at another time – but it is what i believe. if i can’t live here, i can’t live anywhere else. i’m not sure if i believe that because i live here, or live here because i believe it. NO ONE IN SAN DIEGO CAN, WITH WHOLE HEART AND WHOLE HEAD, SAY WHY SHE LIVES HERE. don’t take any of the chamber of torture reasons: the sun the sea the year-round fruit none of it applies. look into their eyes: they squinny up, mouths get that archaic greek grin and you know that whatever they say mortality is on their mind. i have never seen such unacknowledged fear in people. you may think i’m generalizing past accuracy, clipping across racial and economic hedges, but if a city has a denominator more common than its borders, if there is an essence of san diego, it is the fear in the eyes of all the people who live here. so is the label “san diegan’ a metaphor? can you meet a ‘san diegan’ living in laramie, wyoming? i don’t think so. you see new yorkers all over the country, that’s something else, they have aggression, food, arrogance in common – comes from fighting the same enemy and not caring all the time if they win but if you are a san diegan you always come back to where resistance is least: home: the ocean: san diego. people have left this place and stayed away for years, to viet nam, to canada, to reno, to upstate hospitals but they do inevitably return. i’m not sure of this, but i do think there is something honest in this admission that things aren’t better for them anywhere else. that is probably true anywhere, at least the idea that lives aren’t lived better by leaving, if you get what i mean. any anarchy begins at home. san diegans – and look at us my god – are lucky in this totem of ours. if we find out what moves us, maybe we will spread. by ‘moves’ i mean what moves our inner life, our perception and action, and by ‘spread’ i mean we’ll eject fear and use our ‘happy muscles’ as my friend laura calls them. because i won’t or can’t leave this city, i have to move within it, or just glaze over and die.

i don’t mean to change the subject but did you know that there are more women than men here? see me smiling? i read somewhere that the number of males born increases after war and famine. that, my dears, is as good an argument for peace and plenty as i’ve ever heard. if you need an argument. And look at this scene, a moldy orange. gunboats in the sunlight. i’ll wait until these sort of Men die out, but how can we keep them from being born?