You Can Only Go Home Again (2024)

There is the old adage that one can’t get away from oneself no matter how far one goes, or words to that effect. I have been discovering the truth of this nugget everywhere on my journey. No matter which natural retreat or strange city I seem to find myself in, I repeat the familiar patterns, or try to do so as soon as realistically possible. I seek the same pleasures, the same angers, the same distractions, the same occupations, the same thoughts even—it is as if each new place naturally redirects me to the meanings and rhythms I’ve grown accustomed to over the course of my life.

Take my current stay in San Francisco, as I take care of a five-year-old calico cat named Noel, an absolute sweetheart. She was in pretty bad shape when I arrived, the skinniest cat I’d ever seen, at least one who lives indoors. I could feel all her bones, including the bones in her head, which was a first for me. Her loving parents, Ryan and Madison, feed her the vet-recommended Hills “prescription” kibble, the one that consists of hydrolyzed protein, to help with what they think is her IBD. Usually, inflammation in the gut builds up over time as cats eat species-inappropriate food, or eat predominantly kibble. I’ve had nightmare experiences with hydrolyzed protein in the past, long ago when I didn’t know enough about feline nutrition. It is basically a “food” that bypasses food because the assumption is that the cat’s digestive system can no longer handle whole animal proteins; the first ingredient listed on the Hills hydrolyzed protein Noel has been eating is brewers rice, followed by a bunch of oils; there is no real animal protein, nothing recognizable as food. It doesn’t really surprise me that decades later vets continue to have little curiosity about cats’ diets and go straight to prescribing the same awful Hills food whose taste cats hate. She was also prescribed the steroid budesonide, which has its own terrible side effects, but Noel hated it so much her parents discontinued it. I didn’t weigh her but Noel couldn’t have been more than a handful of pounds; she was the lightest cat I think I have ever known.

Retraining Noel to eat well

Of course I have to try to do whatever I can to help return Noel to health. Ryan seems to be open to every suggestion of mine, including the ultimate one of trying homemade raw food, which is the ultimate cure-all for a cat in her condition. Prebiotics, probiotics, digestive enzymes, immune system help, plus more appropriate wet foods whose taste she might like and which are closer to real food, the parents are open to it all, so I’m very encouraged. It will take some effort, perhaps a couple of months of trial and error, and perhaps some small setbacks as the inflammation gets triggered again by Noel eating real food again, but she seems young enough and overall in good enough health to be able to fully recover. If they keep up with the plan and remain committed to it, which is a big if. Her life otherwise was miserable and probably headed to an end within a few months, because she needed to have an appetite stimulant administered in her ear before she would even taste the Hills wet food, and to eat just a few bites of the kibble each time. Noel loves the taste of the new food I’m giving her, and she even loves the taste of the probiotics and enzymes. It’s all very exciting to her. Next is making raw food for her, which will require me buying a proper food processor, which they don’t have.

Over the weekend I visited Anne and Lori, my writer friends, whose cats Oscar and Prakash I’d taken care of for three weeks over the winter, my first extended stay in San Francisco. Prakash, the apparently healthy fifteen-year-old, who used to spend all day outside, died suddenly of a probable stroke in April; whereas Oscar, the one with all the health problems including asthma and thyroid issues, is going strong, looking better than ever. I had been quite worried about Oscar’s health—he’s the cuddliest cat I think I’ve ever met, spending all night resting on my chest or shoulder while hardly moving—when I was staying there, and this time, when visiting Oscar I mentioned raw food as a great palliative, both Anne and Lori were very interested. I’m sharing my formula with them, and once they return from a Scandinavian vacation they promise to give it a try.

My point is that the same life patterns repeat everywhere, although I could have chosen many other examples. I am staying close to cats, maximizing my time with them, even during an ostensible journey to discover or rediscover America. I am evangelizing for raw food and natural diets and healing all over the place, hoping for responsive ears. I am helping animals, staying within myself, and I would say for the most part avoiding seeking the kind of company that I have long ago learned to shun and that would be destabilizing for my mental health—I mean so-called “normal” people in America with their messed-up views about personal relationships and culture and politics with whom I’ve had no truck since at least college, if not even before that. In a city like San Francisco there is plenty of opportunity to seek out such interactions, but it seems worse than pointless. One already knows the outcome, and in certain cases if there is an impending interaction one learns to detect the early warning signals before it becomes a full-blown crisis.

Oscar, my best buddy when I was staying in Ingleside

I am repeating the same patterns even in terms of my perambulations around the city. I seem to keep finding myself again and again on Geary Boulevard, traversing the Sunset and Richmond districts; this time, instead of Ingleside on the southern edge of the city proper, I am staying in Sunset, just a block from the entrance to Golden Gate Park, right in the middle of the interesting shopping and restaurants, which seems unbelievably fortuitous to me. One day last week I spent a couple of hours strolling in the park, taking in some of the most interesting sights, and I hope to walk in the park at sunrise a few times in the rest of the time remaining to me in San Francisco. When I drive around the city it is often to Nob Hill (where I found a doctor, and also where I took my Covid shot last week, at the best CVS pharmacy ever), Haight Ashbury, Hayes Valley, Cole Valley, the Mission, the Castro, the same few neighborhoods again and again in an east-west or west-east direction. During the my first go-around in San Francisco, I seemed to be sighting Golden Gate Bridge every single day, and often crossed it in both directions, not realizing that there was a toll to enter the city on the bridge; this time, even though I’m staying so close to the bridge, I haven’t even glimpsed it once, not during a whole week of driving around the northern part of the city, which seems incredible to me, because it would seem that there would be some vantage point from where I could see it, but that’s how it is; I’ll have to seek it out, apparently. I couldn’t get enough of the bridge last time, which felt to me like the most glorious sight of all, and now I can’t even see it.

Ocean Beach, the closest one to where I am staying in Sunset

Californians on the whole seem to me the most aggressive, rude, vulgar, impolite people among all Americans. It is like being Americans with all the negative characteristics on steroids. Arrogant, that’s the word I’m looking for, isolated from the rest of the country and not giving a damn about it. In Los Angeles, that city that has become a dystopian nightmare—more on that another time—and in San Francisco, they seem blindly steeped in all the illegitimately acquired wealth and power of empire. San Francisco and its surrounding areas, the world’s greatest tech region, has a different kind of arrogance than LA’s, not as glamorous and invested in showing off in a vain and cheap manner, but it is an arrogance nonetheless. The arrogance of empire is that it rubs off on everyone, even those who have little to do with maintaining its power, and even those who are suffering the most from its power. It is the same as rooting for your favorite sports team when your own life might be falling apart, loving the city you can’t afford to live in because it is associated with certain glamorous symbols. My pattern of travel is that I remain at a parallel path with those in LA or San Francisco who are saturated with this ignorance—I meant to say arrogance, of course. They drive insanely fast in their beautifully marked lanes on roads that can sometimes be actually well paved and they think it’s a God-given right to move fast through life. Speed is everything in California, and you notice this the moment you enter from another state. There is a world of divide between Arizona and California, or Nevada and California; I will find out about Oregon next week. I want nothing to do with this speed.

Chronicling all the independent literary bookstores in the country

In other ways too my patterns are self-replicating. I find myself going out in search of the same healthy food, or at least food that feels healthy to me, from the same kinds of sources. Abraham’s Farmers Market on Geary Boulevard, across from San Francisco Toyota, is my favorite in the city; it is as close to Houston’s own Jerusalem Halal Meats as I have found on my journeys. I find that the neighborhood Chinese grocery stores in Sunset and Richmond are overpriced. But everything this summer at Abraham’s is offered at firesale prices, and the fruits and vegetables are of outstanding quality. Cherries, lychees, apricots, grapes, everything tastes wonderful and is generally priced under a dollar per pound. I bring home huge bags of fruit for around fifteen or twenty dollars, enough to fill up the fridge.

One of my favorite places to shop for fruit

I seek out the same experiences in terms of eating, cooking, being with cats, walking by myself (almost as if I were in a blind zone), staying under trees and near plants (did I mean to say talking to them?), so it often feels, at least in a city, that I haven’t left at all. For that matter, why am I seeking out cities so much? Wasn’t this journey supposed to be about the wilderness? But I can’t seem to get away from the oddities of “civilization” that let me fall into familiar patterns. The old adage never felt truer than now.

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