22nd Anniversary of 16th / Mission Outdoor Open Mic (SF)

Over time, everything gets a little hazy… if you do the math, which I’ve tried to do but I’ve done it imperfectly, the most corners we could have possibly had, are eleven hundred, twenty-two, but you have to subtract eight for the time it took to actually come to the corner regular, which was proabably in July…

During the pandemic, our corners were sporadic, we took at least three months off at the beginning, and would watch the disease dashboard from the state to determine whether it was safe. More often than not we said no… but we were social distancing before socialdistancing became the norm (I was going to write “cool” but it was never cool!)

so let’s split the difference there and lop an extra seventy-five off the total.

So whever the number it’s somewhere north of a thousand corners, if we shave the number a little further, because well, nobody’s kept any records anyway, this corner can be seen as our thousandth corner.

There aren’t too many things that happen a thousand times especially, without any resources, or well, nothing.

Well… something, there is something…

We’ve been reflecting over the challenges we’ve had at the corner in light of our current occupation by a giant cop motorhome, which has turned our vibrant corner of a living city into the corner of dying strip mall parking lot in the Inland Empire.

They will leave, of course. They will turn the key on that truck and drive away.

The truck has been there for eleven corners, the way things are going, on the anniversary it will have been there for thirteen corners.

Always liked that number, there was an amazing bar once, named “The Lucky Thirteen” … so maybe we need to use our thousandth corner (give or take) to take back the corner, at least to us!

We’ve asserted our right to be there, a thousand times is kind of an easement… but a plaza full of people is our goal and they don’t have to be there “for” us, they have to be there because they “are” us…

Maybe next year, we’ll have a series of events, we need to get ourselves geared up for the big 25 somehow, but now, let’s be there for and with each other, and let’s have some fun