Open Your Golden Gates

To everything, turn, turn, turn.

Now, I'm in San Francisco, CA, which is not someplace I ever dreamed I’d live. OK, that’s not true because doesn’t everyone with half a brain dream of living in San Francisco? But given my history of under-employment, the Bay Area never seemed like a practical choice.

But here I am and I can’t believe it. I get to live in this incredible house.

Actually I get to share the incredible house that the cars live here. There are more of them than there are people at this point. The house really isn’t IN San Francisco proper as you can tell by the amount of yard and stuff. It’s in Walnut Creek, far from the wagging fingers of the public transit vigilantes. This is still California after all and it’s nice to be able to feel cozy with your vehicles under one roof. Or six roofs, as the case may be.

So, sure there’s plenty of cars in California, just like they told me there would be. I just got here so stereotypes are a nice shorthand way of getting a grip on the place. There’s the California beaches and the ocean, another icon. Though it’s cold and gray now that daylight savings time has begun, it’s still beautiful out there on the edge of the wild Pacific.





Other icons of San Francisco: Victorian houses and gays and cable cars and cults. Eventually I will encounter them all.

Let me give you a for-instance. I was over on 22nd street and went inside this building:


I thought it was another gothic-esque church but it’s been repurposed by the Hua Zang Si Buddhists. Here’s their main Buddha which resides on the second floor:

There are offerings to the various Buddhas all over the place. This one has one thousand golden cups of water in front of him along with fruit and incense and sound, which are all part of the Buddha gift bag.

In the middle of the room is this glass case. It’s kind of hard to tell what it is from the picture and it’s also hard to tell when you are standing right in front of it.



This is a sculpture of Mt. Sumera, which is an important place in Buddhist cosmology and is basically due north of the known world, where we are now. So, to me here in San Francisco, it’s like Marin. Inside that sculpture are two sacred relics, actual pieces of Satyamuni, the medicine Buddha.

It got me thinking about starting my own spiritual movement, the Nanny Orthodox Temple.



I have a captive audience of ready-made followers at the park. We will meet in our small cabals in plain view at Gymborees and fast food coffee shops like Dunkin' Donuts where there will be colorful distraction for our tiny bundles of responsibility, necessary while we plot a spiritual path for ourselves from the comfort of our tracks suits.
I think these ladies are an underutilized source of strength and I want to harness the power of nannies for enlightenment. Lately, just about anything has a ring of possibility to it, doesn’t it?

This is Moe saying goodbye while continuing my search for Nirvana in the Bay Area.