Hyperlocal News + Stories Archives

On Watching Sunsets Fall Atop Presidio Tunnel Tops

1Sep

By Matt Charnock1 Comment

Essays, Feature Pieces, Hyperlocal News + Stories

On Watching Sunsets Fall Atop Presidio Tunnel Tops

It's an exercise in finding gratitude and absorbing enchantments — while celebrating SF’s ‘most hyped’ park in years For the most part, I've healed from the worst, most searing case of burnout I’ve ever experienced in my life — a sullen period marked by a listless numbing over sometime in June. During Pride Month, a time marked by queer frivolity and remembrance, my body felt apathetic to the stimulus around it. Everything began feeling, tasting like ash; the glossy veneer enveloping the career successes I’ve amassed over the past five years began to grow opaque. By the middle of the month, I decided to let the majority of vocational responsibilities I was juggling in the air go uncached. To see what would hit the floor and inevitably bounce back up; allow the weightier, denser,...

Francisco Park Is Still Giving ‘Mini Dolores Park’ Energy

And I v much continue to be here for it I've gone to one of San Francisco’s newest City parks — which is among the largest of its kind to open in almost 40 years — almost every single day since it opened this past on a gloomy Wednesday in April. I’ve seen the sunrise here in citrus Pantones; I’ve seen the afternoon blue sky wash over the horizon atop the park’s gorgeous staircases; I’ve witnessed our solar system’s nearest star dip below the Marin Headlands come sundown… while I was planking on a patch of open, green grass. I've planted herbs in the community garden. I completed a thirty-minute HIIT workout on the park’s shouldering steps (that run from Francisco Street to Bay Street down below). I’ve snuggled more dogs than I can count. I saw young humans partake in the blissful merri...

On Crowded Walks Through San Francisco’s Panhandle

There’s specific happiness in finding yourself in step with strangers. To be a human being means existing in perpetual dichotomy: to juggle two (or three or four or five) juxtapositions in tandem, weighing each notion against the other with muted certainty. My job — cutting teeth and grinding molars, extrapolating reflections and ideas onto the page — lends itself to straddling the line that splits introverted and extroverted activities. I’m inherently, innately, overtly on the side of the former social quality; I’m a reticent individual who can masquerade as a jovial winged insect under blips of manic conviviality for about ninety minutes at a time. But I, too, am a member of a social species. Finding myself amongst kin is as vital to my continued existence on this mortal coil as sec...