It’s sandal weather again, hallelujah.

Dropping off Mari at City Hall, coasting down San Pablo while Keith Jarrett’s 1970’s piano chops flow out of public jazz radio like a flirtatious girl on a first date.

The stretch of San Pablo from 20th to 40th is one of Oakland’s most blighted thoroughfares. Every block is bookended with a liquor store at the beginning and a ramshackle chapel at the end. In between are Korean grocers, struggling small businesses, and a few mechanics. The only slice of corporate America audacious enough to show its face are paycheck advance lenders. There is not a single bank on San Pablo for 20 blocks.

blight |blīt| |blaɪt| |blʌɪt|
noun
a plant disease, esp. one caused by fungi such as mildews, rusts, and smuts : the vines suffered blight and disease | [with adj. ] potato blight.

I still can’t get use to how they say San Pablo up here. Not Sahn Pahblo, but Saan Paablo. You’d think, eventually, it would begin to sound just fine, but still, I flinch each time I hear those ugly A’s where they don’t belong. On both sides of the street Black men and women, young and old, impeccably dressed, make their way north and south. The hue of epidermis – that thin layer, thinner than the cotton of a t-shirt, that holds together our heart and guts and blood – ranges from caramel to ash, but is unconditionally what we’ve come to call in this country, ‘Black’.

San Pablo from 20th to 40th is what Op-Ed writers and rappers and preachers refer to as Black America. And, if you’re sufficiently objective and politically incorrect, you see that it is its own country. Which is not to say that you can’t or shouldn’t visit, but like any other country, unless you’re born there, you’re probably not going to get citizenship.

I have an office now. 22nd and Broadway. Come visit, first drink’s on me at Luka’s. I’ve spent the last eight years of my life in search of a job that wouldn’t require me to work in an office. Finally that dream has come true and what do I do? I get an office.

For lunch yesterday I walked a few blocks up to Mama Buzz Cafe on Telegraph. It reminds me a lot of Miracles Cafe: same hipster mugs, same angry cutish baristas, and the same customers. White, with tattoos, MacBooks, Converses, and iced lattes. The café looks purposely run down, like $200 jeans that have been ripped at the knees and worn at the crotch. Each customer seemed the polar opposite of the immaculately dressed men and women walking down San Pablo. Whereas San Pablo’s pedestrians sport starched, bleached white shirts, Mama Buzz’s cyberhipsters slouch over their laptops in wrinkled and stained cowboy shirts from the 1970’s. Whereas San Pablo’s pedestrians glide gracefully down the sidewalk in polished leather shoes and bright white basketball sneakers, Mama Buzz’s customers shuffle around in sandals and Converses scrawled with drunken Sharpie nonsense.

I ate my panini while reading Cannery Row at the bar, not wanting to take up an entire table. Just as I finished my last bite, a young Black girl walked in, a blipster, the only non-White person in the entire cafe. “What’s a Mate?” she asked the on-edge girl behind the bar.
— A latte? It’s espresso with milk.
— No, a mmmate, what’s a mate?
— Oh, it’s like a tea thing.
— Oh … can I get it iced?
— Umm … no, not really.
— Hmmm, ok, umm, can I get an iced chai then? With soy milk please.

While her Chai was being made she looked around the café as if it were the first time she’d been there and noticed that nearly everyone was staring at her. She offered a cheerful smile, but just as the hundreds of individual muscles of her face agreed to work in unison to produce the most natural of disarming gestures, her spectators embarrassedly shifted their gazes to the glossy monitors of their laptops and pretended to read. Before her beautiful smile could meet their observations it began to evaporate and floated upward through the roof, into the sky, above the clouds, and into the sparse ether of the atmosphere, that thin layer – thinner than the tierra firma under our feet – that holds together the oceans and mountains and trees and animals and bugs.