Posts By Dan Ryan
The decent thing on Ocean Avenue
A few weeks ago in San Francisco, I had just left my favorite comics shop and was in my car about to turn south onto Ocean Avenue when I saw an old lady had fallen to the concrete on the public transport platform in the middle of the street. Before I could pull my car over and jump out to help, a young man had already reached her. As I watched I knew I was witnessing newsworthy decency, and felt like I was seeing San Francisco write a song lyric about itself and the kindness built into the way this city moves.
And so from my car I saw the young man render aid to the fallen woman. He was gentle with her and handled her firmly but without aggravating her obviously fragile state…
Then he helped the lady get her legs back under her, and reclaim the clearly-necessary cane that had somehow failed her in the first place. While this happened drivers passed by oblivious, not necessarily out of callousness but because San Francisco is a body and it’s sometimes hard or risky to step outside one’s place in its street-artery flow…
When she got to her feet, the old lady checked her hands for injuries while the young man stood by to ensure her well-being. After a few moments the woman stopped trembling and stood firm but relaxed, which in turn caused the young man to relax. When I realized everything would be okay I started my car and finally turned south onto Ocean Avenue to continue my way home…
All of this happened literally within the space of 15 seconds. I checked the time stamps on my photographs to be sure. It was a hell of a thing seeing the kind of small but powerful human episode I’ve only read about in the news or seen dramatized on TV. But this is the way we orbit each other, and sometimes need’s gravity pulls us closer together than we would ordinarily prefer because there’s a life to be saved or changed for the better.
It’s how we’re built, thankfully, and I’ll remember that and celebrate it even if this kind of decency never unfolds before my eyes again.
(On Ocean Avenue @ San Leandro Way, San Francisco, California, November 2017. See my other work here and here.)
Encounter at a taqueria
A beautiful girl,
down on her luck.
I gave her two dollars,
she only asked for a buck…
(La Mordida Taqueria, Pacifica, California, November 2017)
Goodbye, Rachel
A short, very unofficial sequel to “Blade Runner”…
“The river of the world is wide, but its waters are boiling away” kept going through my mind as I sat next to her bed in the hospice, holding her hand and waiting for her to end. The quote was from a movie I took her to see a year ago in San Francisco. It was about the Off-world colonies and the death of Earth. One of Eldon Tyrell’s numerous subsidiary companies produced the film, and another subsidiary had done the special visual effects.
When I was still a cop I used to know things like this, that a wealthy, powerful man like Tyrell had a vast cultural reach he kept hidden from little people.
And he had, somehow, used his wealth and influence to spare Rachel’s life from other blade runners and let me take her out of L.A. Since then she and I had had two years together, up north in San Francisco and a few remaining small cities beyond. This meant she was six, and for all I knew the oldest replicant who ever lived.
But she wouldn’t live to be seven. A cancer seventy percent of humans ordinarily survive was eating her bones like carnival midway candy. Unnaturally aggressive. The unlicensed oncologist said maybe it was a flaw in her genetic design. Who knows? Tyrell never said anything about human diseases. Until the cancer started killing her a month ago she’d never even had a sniffle or a runny nose.
For two years I had loved her. Her laughter, when she eventually found it, had helped kill some of my pain and taken Roy Batty out of my nightmares. Now she was minutes away from gone, and once again all I could do was just watch someone die.
At least a bullet in the back wouldn’t take her life. She would die in my arms and part of me would die with her.
After she retires, I think I might go back to L.A.
Goodbye, Rachel.
The laundromat is a lovely-shiny-golden human place.
My wife and I live in an 88-year-old house which has never been adequately retrofitted to accommodate the installation of a washer and dryer for laundry. We’re slowly setting aside the cash to one day solve that problem, but in the meantime once or twice a month we schlep our dirty duds to a local laundromat. Now, you’ll get no argument from me that the process of driving (or walking) five or six pillow cases full of laundry to the laundromat then spending two or more hours washing, drying, and folding your wardrobe is basically a pain in the ass.
It is, particularly if the laundromat is crowded and you have to wait for dryers. So, yes, laundromats are as mundane as a library card. But they’re also rich, warm places in which to be in the thick of humanity’s ebb and flow. At least the one I use is. And yesterday, the last Monday in September, was a very rewarding day for me as a photographer washing socks and capturing human moments at the laundromat…
Tiny twin girls, who were as adorable as their big, burly father was good-natured and easy with a laugh. I learned what a easy-going fellow he was when I asked his permission to take this photograph.
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Miles the laid-back Chihuahua, in the arms of his primary human and receiving loads of adoration from his fan club on the left.
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Edgar the relaxed Malamute, with a nice lady who coincidentally is the mother-in-law of a friend of mine. The lady rescued Edgar from a Malamute breeder who beat him the first two years of his life and kept him in a small cage with ten other dogs.
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This is Brenda. She’s 72 and undergoing cancer chemotherapy for the first time in her life. She just started the chemo, that very morning in fact, but won’t know if it takes until some time this November. She’s happy to be getting treatment, because the cancer was making her very sick. She’s originally from North Carolina, but she and her man are moving to San Diego to settle while Brenda undergoes further cancer treatments. Her pink ribbon hat caught my eye, but her candor and aura of optimism and hope held my attention.
At the laundromat, there’s always more life and hope and joy and pain than you think.
(Super Coin Laundry, Brisbane, California, September 2017)
Reflection in a Japanese restaurant
I often look into mirrors
to view worlds we don’t normally see.
This woman in my world, for example,
at the next table over in a Japantown restaurant,
she was pretty and she was beside herself.
“That’s a great literal use of that phrase,” I thought
as I went back to eating my katsu curry.
And as I did I hoped
the woman in the mirror world
didn’t reach out and touch
the woman in my world,
as this would surely throw both worlds
into dangerous chaos and flux.
(Izumiya Restaurant, Japantown, San Francisco, September 2017)
The Sky
It rained a little bit this morning.
Not much,
just a few enlarged drops,
smacking the hood of my car.
Just enough rain
for the sky to
let the Earth know
that the Sky can kill it
anytime it wants.
But the Sky keeps the Earth around
like that coaster on the dining room table,
the coaster you got in Vegas
when you were just drunk enough
to win $100 on video poker.
It cost you $200
to win that $100,
and that’s how the Sky feels about the Earth.
We banish it
and frustrate it
and fill it with
our piss
and our vinegar.
The Sky is not our cloud atlas,
(The Sky really hated that book)
and it is not the take-away menu
at your corner dipshit combini.
The Sky is
your beauty and your love.
The Sky is
the only way you’ll ever get to Mars.
The Sky is
a chest of drawers full of only bright things,
marvelous things,
things of silk and satin and Japanese whimsy.
The Sky
is your mother
and your father
and we are rather cross with you right now
and need you to knock that shit off.
This Mormon boy
This Mormon boy
(I didn’t get his name and it doesn’t matter)
was on his mission at Nakano Station
handing out tickets to god and scattering seeds of fertilized Jesus.
The Japanese soil won’t take those seeds.
The Japanese never needed a long-haired hippie foreigner to tell them
how to fear death and ghosts.
Besides, Japan’s gods are legion,
tend to be more entertaining,
and bring darker blood and better humor to dinner parties.
And they’re good for a short loan and fast drink on payday.
What this Mormon boy didn’t understand,
will never understand,
is Jesus will never get more from the Japanese than a 90-day visitor’s visa.
The Japanese love their ancient gods so much
they’ve made them characters in video games.
And how is Jesus going to bring devout people
closer to heaven than that?
(Nakano Station, Tokyo, September 2013)
American dreaming
An older gentleman dozing in his van while a summer breeze animates an American flag and the late morning sun illuminates the multitude of second-hand clothing he had for sale at the Alemany Flea Market in San Francisco…
(Alemany Flea Market, San Francisco, California 2017)
Let’s America
Or not….
(Brisbane, California 2017)
