other people's epiphanies

My writing was going nowhere so I went in search of epiphany and found it at the top of Buena Vista Park while watching the sun fall closer to ripples of green-magic hills floating in the blue bay, kissing monterey cypress and pine trees lighting the white-mist coast. I was by myself, but it could not have been more perfect, except for a homeless man screaming monologue under a blanket beside a wheelchair, you had to wonder how he got up all of those steep hills in that wheelchair. But it didn't kill the mood for the most enchanting gay couple in the city, two lovely men in their 50s, one was grabbing handfulls of scent off flowering bushes and pirouetting while the other held his hand and drank the air in. There were even three 20-year-olds in club-scene homie-worthy attire; San Francisco is so beautiful everybody can appreciate it.
It's hard to follow a beautiful, thoughtful evening with a night full of drinking and dancing without feeling a kind of dumb culture shock. It was a charity benefit party for Israeli Independence Day, and after wine on the bus with Ingrid all the way to the Sunset (not nearby, let me tell you) I found myself profoundly drunk having an intense conversation with a stranger whom I somehow (I swear I can't fathom how this began to occur) found myself kissing behind a curtain in a control room of some kind, accusing him violently of having picked the location before the girl. The strangest part of it all is going from intense imaginary romances to blurry, casual actual romances that leave no room for excitement or reflection of any kind and wondering which I prefer. Somehow I get the feeling he does that sort of thing all the time. Of course the real irony is that in a room full of 95% Jewish and Israeli males I managed to hit it off with the one Catholic in the room.
The next morning I went to the How-weird Street Festival because it was 3 blocks from my house. Be it the vague hangover, the booths of all hemp-related products or the intense drug use in the air, I could only handle about 45 minutes of it before I left to avoid becoming an actual vegetable. I'm a tremendous fan of public spectacle and street festivals, but I'm either too timid or just too turned off by drugs to get into intense public daylight dancing in nondescript costume. The crowd was into it though. 10 hours later while picking up Brokeback Mountain from the video store with my roommate we saw many of them just leaving, stumbling through the dark streets in green capes and gold running shorts back to their vehicles which they would hopefully stop hallucinating enough to drive home safely.