Sweat dripping at the Oakland Zoo

The last I could recall taking a trip to the Oakland Zoo was twenty to twenty-one years ago on a field trip with my class, where Mrs. REDACTED¹ was primarily escorting me–this was during the brief year-and-a-half stint at a Christian private school up on a hill in Antioch, Stepping Stones Academy, which took about a twenty minute drive to get there from West Tenth Street in the neighboring town of Pittsburg, and no I do not mean Pittsburgh. This was all in California, the state I was born, and the state that I lived in up until I nearly turned twenty-one years old. Prior to the move I made to Maryland in 2018, the only time I had left California was to visit my Grandparents, the Phillips, for their 50th anniversary in Arizona. I don’t recall much from that experience, I was experiencing my scene phase at the age of 14 and was pathetically addicted to 2007 Runescape private servers due to the main game updating its graphics to where my 500MB RAM Dell PC, from my Mom’s old office, could no longer run it. My Grandfather seemed more concerned about his dead dog, Wolfy, who he cared for more than my brother and I–he was looking into cloning him. This never happened, most likely relating to how he sold his ranch in Madera (outside of Fresno, CA, where I was born) to buy a trailer in Arizona and Colorado. Anyhow, my fondest memories of the trip was driving out to a delicious pizza place that was seemingly in the middle of the desert, and downloading a Runescape private server in the hotel lobby and playing it till I was no longer allowed to. I got a dragon chain body from a dust devil on the lowest floor of Slayer Tower, something very exciting to me at the time even though it was a whack server where I was one of the only players online.

Oh, where was I? Mrs. REDACTED. She was the mother of RDACTED, who had a shorter brother that I do not recall the name of. We all went to her house for haircuts, aside from my Father (my Mother would call his hairdresser his girlfriend), and I found it kind of weird how the REDACTEDs would all let the dogs lick inside their mouth because dog breath is utterly foul to my young mild dog allergic immune system (I still find it quite repulsive). They had a huge backyard with a play structure and their house was very clean, it was always fun to go over there. Mrs. REDACTED was often controlling of her son, I don’t quite understand why–he was held back several times, and a memory of our teacher, Ms. Lennon, yelling at him for calling her Ms. Lemon, still rattles about in my head at times. RDACTED was kind, easily overwhelmed, and had a slight lisp with slurred speech–looking back now, it was most likely a neurological issue. He was mostly white (whatever that means) but also a bit of Japanese, I’m constantly wondering what the implications of being mixed race mean for our immune systems–the advantages, the disadvantages; are we inferior or are we experiencing a stage of evolution post-colonization and from the ease of travel?

The Oakland Zoo–that’s what I was talking about! I was a very skittish child with extreme sensitivities that was misdiagnosed as migraines, tension headaches, and fibromyalgia (at the ripe old age of 12 years old)… I did not often make friends in class, the main reason I had friends was because my Mom would hardcore network with the other parents and it ended with me mostly having boy friends; there is one girl friend I made, from my brothers class, who showed me Runescape & Furbys when we were older–she died almost 10 years ago. Back to the story–I would sit and cry, with a vivid memory of a classmate of mine, REEDACTED, commenting on how I was always sad in a solemn tone. I don’t recall much of the zoo as a wee child, I mostly clung to Mrs. REDACTED, but I do often go back in the chamber of memories about how I stood in the middle of the gorilla exhibit to stare at them in awe. I kept my distance, I didn’t want to make the gorillas uncomfortable. At the end of the visit, it was time for the gift shop! Where everything was too expensive, my parents didn’t give me money, but Mrs. REDACTED bought me this little purse with a tiny chihuahua in it.

Is there any point to this? The re-experiencing of hazy memories that feel like minced meat in my brain due to the perpetual overstimulation of my adolescence that lacked adequate treatment in exchange for relentless beatings without meaning. Will I gain the insight I have longed for from inside myself? There is indeed a level of empowerment in living in an area I spent both most of my formative years and some of the most traumatic in terms of needless physical altercations that correlated with ableism. While my Mother might be autistic with similar chronic ailments, the extent of its progression from a young age seemed nonsensical to her, and how much easier it’d be if I were to be a faker or a young alcoholic as she believed (drinking was for the weekends as a teen or gamer all-nighters with my European friends). The impact on my brain affected every aspect of my personality, I was erratic, hateful yet loving, and I appeared to be on drugs at the age of 12 when I was! I was on SSRI’s!

The past leaps into my chest and clenches my big lungs to deprive it of the air I breathe the moment my immune system perceives a contaminant that it targets outside of my control. While I do have an array of personalities in my shed, they are merged and mangled by the years of repression I have experienced at the hands of those with power over me. A grim reminder a couple of days before the Zoo, I was smoking a low THC joint (4:1 THC:CBD) in San José with a new friend who has also experienced misogynistic ableist childhood trauma, and while I was allowing her to smoke the rest of my weed, a crew came out to spray down the sidewalk before it was even evening. My friend had thought she did something wrong when I was unable to speak while I fought off the Devil taking my chest down under. What exactly triggered me was most likely greasy food remnants from the pavement, & despite my cannabis use, myself and everyone else deserve direct confrontation before potentially fatal passive aggression. The recreational legalization of this medicinal psychoactive drug has demonized users with valid medical needs, I was not using it at the age of 14 purely out of recreation–it was all I had to numb out the dysfunction in my body when the heavy prescription drugs did nothing more than accelerate my declining health.

I have become accepting of the necessity I have for facial coverings to prevent the large particles of food and other inflammatory contaminants from giving me a flare–I exist in a delicate state after getting bombarded by my triggers in San Antonio, TX. I love to flash people a smile and masking often takes a toll on my mental health, but all I hope is my sincerity can be seen by my eyes alone. They’re very loud, from what I have been told…

Before the zoo, I had woken up at 5am to get ready and head over to the plasma center in South Hayward. I’m physically improving significantly after a month in the Bay Area, and I thought it could be beneficial to drain my system of whatever that’d otherwise stagnate circulating in my system. In the past, I’ve gone in with a headache and donation made it depart. There were not a lot of employees there an hour after opening, so I did not wait long to be called in for my physical where I had a nice conversation with the nurse conducting it. Unfortunately, I was turned away from this center due to my proof of address being a piece of paper that I used a box cutter to remove from a box that was shipped with UPS. They were firm that they would only accept a billing statement or a piece of mail that was sent through the United States Postal Service.

–Secretly, I was hoping it’d be cut short so I could have more time to explore Garin Regional Park, which was within walking distance. Roméo confirmed he would mail me a letter through USPS for my next plasma center visit, so I headed out to a 7-Eleven for a liter of water and then onwards down the connecting street, straight up to the trail. The walk up through the residential was a hike in itself and I had to stop several times to catch my pitiful breath, as I made the mistake of pulling down my gaiter to inhale an epic amount of allergens that was created by rampant yard-work happening up and down Garin Ave. For most of my life, I was acclimated to getting over asthma attacks, even though plenty will say that isn’t possible when it is a privilege to be diagnosed with these ailments when you were born female. Countless nights of insomnia from a young age, hitting my little nose in the hopes it would stimulate more airflow. I got over it, because the human will to live is the most potent of drugs.

Once reaching the park, I ate a little snack, got out my camera, and set onwards on the trails that headed North to get back on over to the South Hayward BART station in time to get to Oakland to visit the zoo with my friends. It was around 80 degrees fahrenheit, I had a thin turtleneck on with a killing kennedy’s t-shirt on over it, high waist jeans, cotton and wool socks beneath my hiking boots, with a bodybuilding hat on with a gaiter. I was sweating like Hell, which I didn’t mind as I had all sorts of little bugs to take pictures of and gorgeous nostalgic views to take in from every which way. While on this hike, I was reminded of how my classmate from two decades ago, REEDACTED, lived in Hayward, and visiting his family’s area was probably some of the only memories I had of Hayward outside of passing through it on BART on the Berryessa line. Subtle flashbacks of going to No Let Up Camp with him, which was for dancing/cheerleading and football (guess what I was obligated to do?) with a vague recollection of greener hills, and being outside his family home.

Being back where my soul grew, I could nearly see all of the strings pulling on my shoulders down to my hands, hips to my toes, even pulling the corners of my mouth and knots tied to my eyelashes that force my eyes to stay wide open even while they’re closed. I suppose I have some kind of identity crisis at times, since I was restricted by my Mother growing up and by the immensely autistic symptoms of MCAS that inhibited me from being at ease in crowded scenes. But, the reality is, the Bay Area is a large place and we all influenced one another, and I influenced it in return by being outgoing when I felt well enough, alongside my incredibly active time period communicating with others all over the world on Old School RuneScape. All those hours of my Mother driving us through to scenic route shaped my idea of what Home is–beautiful hills, sporadic bodies of water, beautiful people, cows, horses, vineyards (oh how I loved catching people walking home from Freedom High School placing a bundle of grapes into their backpack), and an excessive amount of parks to find solitude no matter the time of day because I always felt safe in areas I was familiar with. Contra Costa County is a diverse place with people of all cultures with a merge of rural, town, and city folk. While the closer you get to the Central Valley the more conservative the Bay Area gets (& closer to NorCal, which I personally see as a separate entity from the BA), which isn’t to say it stems from white supremacy, part of it certainly does, due to the high immigrant rate that is also a factor considering many cultures are conservative in comparison to American-born peoples.

Wait, my most recent trip to the Oakland zoo–I could clearly see the influence that the entirety of the East Bay Area had on this wonderful animal institution. The nepotism and conservative culture of much of the East has led to an investment in community, the zoo being a place for all ages to spend time and use their minds. I was able to look back on how it stimulated my imagination as a child to ride on the “power line” seats, which I didn’t recall as tangible but instead as a recurring childhood dream where I am a ball that I would see on some power-line riding quickly across it. I started to relive childish bewilderment during this visit, as I witnessed grizzly bears (our beloved state animal) with beautiful fur-coats who ran forward while they were tossed and slungshot fresh food over the fence that they got to feast upon. Later on, I got to go inside somewhere to see tiny poisonous frogs mess around and even got to make an exciting level of eye contact with one of the tiny fellows.

This is the home I longed for when I spent three years outside my home state of California searching for a loving family and a home that could not be effectively found. The closest was Pennsylvania, which made it hard to leave while enduring a complex level of domestic violence that was all too familiar to me. Maybe the abuse made me feel at home and so did the beautiful hills and trees I saw immediately when crossing the Delaware border into Pennsylvania. It seemed a profound piece of knowledge when not long after I returned to California, I learned from an elder Bay Area activist² that the state of Pennsylvania was advertising for activists from the Bay to come there and repair the damage done by the paper industry’s deforestation. I had learned of the differences in cultures after going 2000 miles away, experiencing excessive solicitation in Maryland, and the difficulty of failing to make friends who were directly honest with me. Coming from a Mother raised by a German Father and an American-born Mexican Father, both who grew up in Fresno, dancing around the issues was an infrequent occurrence at home. While the heavy-handedness of my parents was an unnecessary act that inhibited my development, the honesty that was directed my way made me a strong individual who can put up with words and spit them out harder if my mind deems an instigators communication unnecessary or nonsensical. I have become thankful for my upbringing, and others like me are found here at home more often than not–it was a fever dream living in the Midwest, Kokomo, IN, where being dishonest is considered polite; it began to rub off on me and turn me into a child that was relearning socialization.

I was blessed with kindness by people who later threw punches at me, by those who quickly pulled it away out of skepticism of my character founded on a paranoid delirium, and especially by those you’d see on the street and think the worst of–those were my favorites, I loved to share what I knew and hear what they did in return. I learned a lot living in homes with 7 others sharing one bathroom³, I obtained a level of gratuity I only ever lose when I am spoiled rotten. The concept of money is a meaningless one to me, this socially constructed tool of power has seldom brought me more happiness than working with the bare minimum surrounded by good company. I learned what soul food was from a former Mother-in-law who encouraged my absolute debasement, the trauma from that home took years for me to overcome (for the most part) but I carried that lesson with me everywhere I’ve lived in abject poverty because it sure is hard for a disabled woman with a hard to pronounce name to keep a steady job. Soul food kept me alive, and it isn’t what people think, because comfort and soul isn’t always interchangeable like the bastardized forms of this modern standardized cuisine has become. It isn’t only fried chicken and Jiffy cornbread, it is something that keeps one alive. It is random ingredients made into a flavorful food. Soul food is full of antioxidant-rich foods that are often tossed away. It is the last of what’s in your fridge and cabinet. Scraps from a garden. It is something that staves away disease when you cannot afford healthcare because long periods of fasting is necessitated to make the food last.

Lessons learned in the Bay Area kept me alive. I gave kindness to anyone even if the situation may have appeared suspicious because fear has a stench. I know that it is a essential survival trait to not reek of when the streets are often mean and hungry. No matter where I was, when loneliness overcame me, there was a desperation to connect with anybody who would gaze into my eyes and listen… my soul was found, it was there. My soul was always there but it had to grow and it will never stop growing until the eternity it takes for the universe to erode from entropy to compound all the energy into a new universe of nothingness where we will all be found again. I would live this life an infinite amount of times over to feel the sensation of being full of soul and connecting with all the other souls until we are all one.

Most of the adults and children were drenched in sweat at the zoo, even in shorts and tank-tops. Every inch of me but my eyes and hands were covered, wearing the same long clothes that had sweat compounding from the casual hike I had done before. Sunscreen doesn’t work too well anymore, and I don’t really seem to get a standard sunburn, but I have been getting strange reactions on my skin more than ever… The UV each year is higher than the one before. I used to ride my bike for hours in over 100 degree Fahrenheit weather, and that is something I cannot imagine being possible for a long time, if ever again.

I had fun at the zoo. I felt like a child again, without the troublesome experience of feeling pain from every little sound.

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It was trash day on Monday, the day I went for a hike. I was walking down 40th, repulsed by the cluster of pigeons ganging up on scraps, then I came up on a few crows hanging out, patiently waiting for some good trash to surface as the garbage men approached.

Finally! Another reason to pull out a snack baggy of raw almonds I stowed away into my front backpack pocket for this EXACT purpose! I tossed some near a fellow, making sure they saw, then I threw a few more after coming forward 50 yards. The crows began doing long caws, alerting others of the bountiful feast, perhaps even trying to communicate their needs to fellow crows. The bird politics in Oakland seem complex, the seagulls will dominate the crows and pigeons due to their superior stature, so in my head I imagine that they have crow solidarity.

I love the crows. When I was a little girl growing up in Pittsburg, I would throw bread out onto the front lawn for the birds. One day in particular, my Mom gave me an ENTIRE loaf of whole wheat bread to put outside and I then covered the entire lawn, the walkway leading up to the stairs, then the stairs, and the porch itself. I went back inside, told my Mom about what I had done, & later peeking out the blinds, I saw them covering the entire front of the house! It was a sea of black! I had never seen anything like it, I couldn’t believe it, so I ran for the door to go say hello and hang out with them, but upon doing so, they all flew away in a murder! I was devastated and ever since that magical day, I learned that the crows desired space. They do not intrude on human activity, they rather use their immense patience to not stir up trouble with us.

Ever since then, I feel watched over by the crows for my infrequent habit of covering our yard in bread. I had a turbulent childhood and the whole neighborhood could hear it, some kids near me would be troubled asking me about how much my Mom would yell, hardly able to look into my eyes when they brought it up. I guess it was no secret and word got around because every now and then, my Moms van in particular would get completely covered in bird shit.

Yesterday, the day after I fed the crows on 40th Street, I was stepping out of the house at 6AM to walk on over to BART to head into San Francisco to visit the Google office, when a crow was perched directly across from the front door onto a power line staring right at me! They began CAW-CAWing at me! I felt awful because I did not have any almonds to gift this fellow, and hurried on over to BART where I heard a variety of crows CAW-CAWing and hanging about.

The guilt I felt hours later when I realized that I did indeed have that baggy of raw almonds in my backpack’s front pocket..

Today I left at roughly the same time as the day before, but I did not come across a single crow that I could connect with through the eyes to feel comfortable leaving food for. I DO NOT feed the pigeons and sea gulls! In my left-hand shallow pocket of my Lucky skinny jeans, I had conveniently tucked away some raw almonds and pecans. They will be there for when the times come and I could bless my good friends who know more about me than anyone else (at least in the mortal realm).

Now that I am settled in at the office, belly full of vegetables, ground beef, and eggs–I feel inclined to write about the Bay Area’s dear, dear crows… after seeing a lovely crow couple from the café balcony on the sixth floor. I often see crows hanging near the balcony to scout for food, and I have witnessed unwelcoming folks in the building shoo them away! I was hoping to see some nearby to leave nuts for since it seemed the seagulls were off somewhere else, but instead, I got to observe a couple hanging near the Bay Bridge, scouting together, and being affectionate with one another. The San Francisco crows were a pastime when I lived on Randolph St with my Colombian brother during my Spring semester at the nearby City College campus.

It started with my brother leaving out a bowl of popcorn for the crows onto our back porch, we were on the 2nd floor and I didn’t realize we even had crows that would come around there, the seagulls often wouldn’t invade our “privacy”. My bedroom was the dining room (it was a closed off room), in the front of the house, so we used the living room as one instead and had the table right up against the window. We would sit there and watch the reconstruction of affordable housing, my brother eventually informed me that the crows would come out on trash day, which I have now learned is a consistent ritual for many a bird species, particularly in the cities. When I noticed them out front, I’d go out to spread out some raw almonds & go back inside to work on my laptop at the dining table, shooing away seagulls and pigeons while comfortably sat indoors to ensure only the crows scooped them up.

This then evolved to teaming up with my brother to ensure the popcorn bowl out back was always full, and I started writing, “I LOVE YOU”, with the raw almonds and I’d make hearts with them too! The back door was in our recreational room / office, where we had an adjustable standing desk with a small window beside it that peered into the back. I started to notice a crow couple that’d come around, usually one of them would come to collect, and the other seemed uncomfortable flying around our porch. I would make strong eye contact with them through the window, and it felt like we had mutual respect for eachother. Especially towards the last couple of months there, I sincerely felt bonded to this majestic couple.

One day, my friend picked me up to show me how to do archery at the range that’s at Golden Gate Park. It was a lot of fun, I kept switching from my left to my right, it was a beautiful upper body workout even though I sucked horrendously at aim. Though, to be fair… his arrows were kind of janky. The true highlight of that afternoon was when I noticed the crow couple catching my attention up in the trees nearby, they were watching over me as I did this sport for the first time. As a child, I had weak upper-body strength and would cry holding onto the monkey bars due to being incapable of harnessing enough control to swing and grab the bars forward, while also being too afraid to let go and fall to the ground. I had always fantasized about being an archer, it was always my favorite thing to do on video games, especially if there was an added feature to be stealth.

On Old School RuneScape, I made a range tank that for years was level 1 Attack and Strength, with a Magic level that was only trained through receiving free half-cast experience through my favorite minigame, Barbarian Assault. On Skyrim, I never really played anything but a sneak archer. It was always thrilling to abuse the mechanics of the games to kill monsters tucked behind crevices and glitchy invisible blocks of space. Looking back on my only archery moment that had the bonus of being seen by the crows, I feel empowered. I will soon accomplish what I have dreamt most of my life: carving out a bow from wood and becoming a sharp shooting ambidextrous archer⁴.

It was a blow to my mood when I no longer saw as many crows on Folsom, nor when I moved beside the SJSU Stadium, and especially not in San Antonio! There were grackles in San Antonio, and they walked in a cocky manner and were incredibly invasive of human space. It felt like I became a lonesome traveler, I no longer felt the safety I did when I lived on Randolph and West Tenth.

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