april fools

On March 31st of 2011, I called my brother Ben at approximately 11:00 Pacific Time, which meant in Ohio it was already April Fool's Day. I didn't stop to think that his live-in girlfriend, Diana, would be woken up when I called. I didn't consider that they had an incredibly yippy dog that would probably wake up too, and then keep them both awake with its incessant barking. I didn't even consider that my planned joke was so ridiculous that Ben would never believe it unless he was half asleep... Okay, maybe I did consider that last one before I woke him up at 2 am to tell him the aliens had finally made contact.

It was one of those happily rare walks home where I had left work late enough that the streets were deserted. Because San Francisco lacks the foot traffic of New York, where I lived for several years, it's also a little scarier at night. One of the things you learn to appreciate about people out and about at 11 pm on a weekday (which New Yorkers surely take for granted) is that you rarely feel uneasy, even in some of the sketchier neighborhoods. In fact, I think sometimes crime is worse in the "safer" neighborhoods where everyone is tucked away for the evening by 8 or 9, but that's the subject of another blog post that I'll likely never write, so you'll have to figure it out yourself. Either way, I rarely feel afraid walking from downtown to Nob Hill at night, due to the large number of insane people who are always nearby.

It might help to understand that here in San Francisco, what we lack in numbers, we make up for in crazy. As Chris Rock brazenly but confidently asserted, "Yeah, I said it!" We might not have the all-hours crowds of New York, the 24 hour economies of Tokyo or Osaka or the comforting gas-lit streetlamps of Cincinnati, but if I were to be assaulted at night by some thug on the downtown streets of San Francisco, I feel confident that as soon as I started to scream for help, at least half a dozen other figures, slumped in doorways or wandering the empty streets, would begin to yell or scream themselves. Whether out of anger, empathy or annoyance, the cadre of crazies would doubtlessly begin to rise up out of their sleeping bags and cardboard boxes, turning down the NPR on their hand-cranked radios or closing the Kafka novel, and try to figure out what all of the ruckus was about.

As a result, I felt emboldened. In a way, calling Ben in the middle of the night for the ultimate April Fools joke, was my own personal SF crazy person moment. To the casual observer, I would certainly qualify: literally shouting "Oh my God, oh my God!" into the phone. I continued to shout until Ben was up and thoroughly disoriented. Then the icing on the cake... "Turn on the TV!"

What was I thinking, yelling at the top of my lungs, as I trekked uphill through the streets of downtown? To be honest, I'm not entirely convinced madness hadn't temporarily(?) taken hold. "They've arrived Ben, they've arrived!" I screamed. I might have added something about how they were talking to Obama... "right now!", but I had worked myself into such a frenzy by that point that my memory is foggy.

As a way of background, it's very important to understand here that my brother Ben is the ultimate April Fools participant. His past successes, of which there have been many, probably have something to do with the fact that he's a good planner, and that he's determined to follow through. It follows naturally, I think, that his Halloween costumes are usually top-notch. He had fooled me the year before, in fact, by telling me rather hysterically that Diana, his girlfriend, was pregnant. It wasn't until I had suffered a minor heart-slash-panic attack that he began to laugh and told me it wasn't so. I think that my own forced hysteria about the "aliens landing" was do-able not because I had temporarily gone insane, but out of my desire to show him that two could play the "everything-is-more-believable-when-you-say-it-in-a-panicked-voice" game.

"What, Aaron? What are you talking about?" He started to ask, before I shouted "Oh my God!!!!" into the phone with such urgency that I must have woken up Diana, since he had to briefly explain to her that no, in fact no one died, but it was quite possible that the aliens had landed.

I think when he finally got the TV on, I knew that I had won. I wanted to make sure I said "April Fools" before he realized he'd been had, so I yelled it into the phone as soon as he confirmed that the emergency White House broadcast was not, in fact, on every channel. Afterward, I cracked up nonstop for the next five minutes. At some point he hung up the phone.

Now it's one year later. The emotions, of course, are mixed. At the time, he vowed revenge. I'm not sure if it was on his own behalf, or on behalf of Diana, who ended up getting three hours of sleep that night, right before a major meeting. Maybe it was because he was half-asleep, or maybe he hadn't heard me say "April Fools", but he ended up convinced that aliens in fact had made contact that night. If he hadn't spent most of the year in jail for calling the White House repeatedly, demanding to see the evidence for the "covered up alien landing", I would feel a little better about the whole thing. As it is, it's been 18 hours into April Fools day, and so far I haven't heard a thing.

At the same time, if they give him access to a phone, maybe he'll come up with something. Maybe he's become a crazy in his own regard, but spending the last eight months in and out of detention facilities has surely given him time to think up some doozies. To be honest, I can hardly wait.

people i want to know

I was walking behind a man heading up Bush street. In this case, heading up literally; I live in Nob Hill and my walk home is a climb of several hundred feet over a handful of blocks. As we ascended, me about three or four paces behind him, I realized that he reminded me of a friend from law school whom I had known but never been particularly close with.

The way we walked up the street together was anthropologically interesting. Although I walked behind him, occasionally we would draw up next to each other before a crosswalk. For those of you not familiar with San Francisco, this is a city where people tend to wait at crosswalks. Although the adopted New Yorker in me protests, I tend to follow the rules myself, if only because safety in numbers doesn't apply when you are the only one in the street. So, I stopped beside the familiar but unfamiliar man and waited for the walk light to turn green so he could pull ahead of me again.

Walking down -or up- the sidewalk is a funny thing when you put two people together, moving at approximately the same speeds, and going in the same direction. Studies show that social interaction can exercise your brain power as well as exercise or hobbies. For me, when I meet another person on the sidewalk, I might as well be running a marathon while studying Japanese. It's particularly exhausting in the morning, when every person I meet on the sidewalk is a potential ally, competitor, [temporary] crush, person of interest or serial killer. It's all I can do to pretend to ignore everyone who passes me by.

Standing next to someone going the same direction as you and trying to decide who goes first is its own kind of mind game. Don't act like you don't think about it... you are walking somewhere and some person in similar physical health and stature comes up alongside you. The sidewalk might be big enough for two people literally, but unless you are running a three-legged race most people wouldn't last more than a moment or two walking straight alongside a total stranger in public.

It's hard to say what happens in those few moments when both people realize they are on a similar trajectory at a shared velocity. Is it a power struggle? A flirtation? Do we size each other up sexually, or try to discern status based on dress, or the way we carry ourselves? Am I over-thinking things?

In this case, with the man on the sidewalk who reminded me of the person I knew in law school, but never got to know as well as I wanted, I hung back for a few seconds as we started walking across the street, and took up the rear. As we moved forward down the street, moving in the same direction, at the same speed, but steps apart, I found myself thinking about my ex-classmate, and wishing that I had made more of an effort to get to know him. Not that this prompted me to catch up and extend a hand to my companion - let's face it, that would have been weird. But it did make me think about what kind of friendship might have been formed, had we been moving at less of a parallel and more of a concave route, a collision course toward forced recognition of each other and our place on the universal sidewalk.