“San Francisco began, for me, with anticipation. Every summer when I was a child my family would drive there to visit my grandparents, a two-day trip that for my brother was hell, and for me was a socially acceptable way to listen to music and daydream for hours on end. San Francisco would bloom in my imagination on that drive, detail by detail: the cotton-candy houses, the steel-toed street punks.”

“Where my grandmother gave me bridge lessons and kept Sunkist fruit gems in her porcelain candy bowl. Where I did not give my pet cactus enough water. Where we shot our BB gun at the lemon tree in the backyard. Where I wore my Redskins 1994 NFL Champions T-shirt so many times it got holes. Where my older brother slept on the empty bottom bunk when I could not fall asleep.”