San Francisco is San Francisco because it is San Francisco. There are times when this fact is unavoidable. It is impossible to deny when you encounter a caricature of a caricature. Let me explain.
Spring arrived with a cold wind in San Francisco at the beginning of March. With clear blue skies and a harsh whipping onshore wind, surfing Ocean Beach was comical. But, the wind abated the last couple of days and allowed the sun to warm the city to a pleasant 60 degrees. Me and my housemate peddled with fins and a wetsuit to do a little bodysurfing at Baker Beach. A small sandy beach nestled in the middle of Land’s End and the Presidio with the Golden Gate Bridge to the east.
Images of bikinis and clean beach breaks muddled our minds as we crossed Geary and headed towards Sea Cliff. And of course, when we arrived, we found both; two young fawns in bikinis laying out on a blanket in the foreground and clean heavy beach break in the background. A beautiful bright Friday afternoon in the central coast.
We pushed our bikes east up the beach to the beach break that looked most makeable.
“Ha! What a day.”
“Couldn’t ask for much more…”
“Lot of people on the beach today.”
“Yeah. Today is the definitely the first day of spring.”
And so it went.
I looked up to measure our progress when we encountered the most percuilar thing: A man with a black shirt roled half way up his belly staring intently at us. He walked across our path never averting his gaze. He also didn’t seem to mind as much as we did that he had no pants on and his junk was swinging jubliantly in the sun.
I then began looking around more carefully at the people around us on towels. They were all pretty much naked and pretty much dudes. I had stumbled inadvertently into a nude beach (a friend in the city said that any end of a beach in San Francisco is a nude beach). And now I know that no nude beach in San Francisco is complete without a game of volleyball. Two full teams of twelve dudes, twenty-four balls, all jumping up and down, the sun reflecting off the warm sand, and not a single pair of pants.
“How did this happen? Could this actually be happening? Did you know about this? And why the hell is there a zillion wangs and none of their counterparts? Oh, wait…is that one?…UGH! Don’t look over there either!”
This is what I mean by a caricature of a caricature: San Francisco is the only place where not only this could happen, but it is almost expected to happen. I should have realized that San Francisco is constantly trying to remind me that it is San Francisco, that all the stereotypes come true at some point (I was at a bar on Monday where some girl was reading poetry about kissing her mother’s breast while a man and woman in black spandex did an interpretive dance of kissing her mother’s breast).
And in the spirit of naked volleyball at Baker Beach, in the spirit of affirming stereotypes, we changed into our wetsuits without towels and went bodysurfing in sandy beachbreak closeouts.
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I guess then that a caricature of a caricature of a caricature is a dude like you blogging about a city where nude volleyball is (expectedly) played.
Shit. Then a caricature of a caricature of a caricature of a caricature is me commenting on you writing that blog.
Dude. At first I was worried you were going to blow Baker beaches cover as an excellent uner cover barrel fest… Then I realized we’re probably ok as the thought of “twenty four bouncing balls” will probably motivate people to check that other closeout nearby instead.