On Death by Productivity and the Presidio Bowl

Presidio Bowl’s unsuspecting exterior. (Google Maps)

Time slows down at the bowling alley. (Paolo Bicchieri)

The boats churning in and out of the San Francisco Bay look all the more enormous from a patio in the shrouded Presidio Park and, with this vista in full view, I remember a sheet of paper on my desk at home. It’s an excerpt from British philosopher Mark Fisher about capitalism’s pervasive power to dominate and infect every part of our shared reality. Fisher says it is this ubiquitousness of the oppression that means any small resistance existing at all speaks to the possibility of destroying the cancerous machine. “From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again,” Fisher writes.

The academic’s words came to me on that cool and pleasant night in November thanks to Presidio Bowl. It’s the national park’s most unassuming attraction in my mind, one I had never even heard of until walking through the area that evening in search of a quick bite before a screening of Saltburn, a movie all about plutocratic excess. The bowling alley is as classic as they come with 12 lanes, burgers and fries aplenty, and a claw machine in the arcade. But it was more than just nostalgic appeal that had me thinking about post-capitalist market tactics.

(Paolo Bicchieri)

I’d been running on empty. The week before I’d been inspired by folks rallying to support the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Palestine with poetry and personal testimony, been trying to bottle that energy and find ways to move it through all 48 hills. But my body was wearing down; My partner was sick, and little did I realize I was catching it, too. Despite a global pandemic — the singular arresting kind of phenomenon that had everyone saying ‘Things are going to be different from now on.’ — I was doing the same thing I do every fall: Work unceasingly.

It’s become a meme at this point, the federal government and many white collar jobs alike providing relief for the worst of COVID only to shrug after a few years, lay everyone off en masse, and redistribute the work amongst the employees who remain. I’m not here to blame those instruments of control, though blame they do deserve. I’m holding myself accountable on this one, as I’ve been overworking myself to disconnect from my body since my job at McDonald’s when I was 15. I can get paid to not pay attention to my life? Hell yeah!

(Paolo Bicchieri)

It was the Presidio Bowl that snapped me out of my zombie state that night. Everything really did feel simpler to grasp at the bowling alley. Teams of bowlers in matching shirts — worn unironically, I might add — competing for trophies and plaques, dozens of which were hanging behind the bar. Service staff loudly joking with each other, bandying with me when I reached for the hot sauce, a jovial mood in the air so palpable the skeptic in me, subjected to far too many awkwardly-crafted jovial service environments, almost discounted. Piping hot curly fries, steam rising in the quiet Presidio air.

I felt at ease, unwinding on the outdoor deck. In my hometown there was just such a bowling alley, the kind of place smelling so strongly of cigarette smoke I’m transported there almost every time I light up. There was no pretentiousness at that cowboy-laden hangout, nor was there at Presidio Bowl. People spoke loudly on their cell phones, many of the staff razzed each other in the way old pals do, and by and large the bowling was the main attraction. A hipster excuse to look cool and roll eyes this was not.

Is this the kind of event Fisher meant when discussing the opportunities that push back against omniscient capitalist realism? Likely not — I bought my fries and club soda, and the bowling alley is not a commune of farmers bartering rutabagas for an hour of time on the lanes. But in the way the hyper-commodified self-care movement began as legitimate acts of resistance or that a blockbuster movie such as Saltburn mocking blue blooded Oxford families are political, then, indeed, so too is relaxing at Presidio Bowl.

For me, I need experiences that jar me out of my capitalism-induced state of hypnosis a la George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. There are many days that all the things I do, all the things I try, just feel like pointless exercises in ego-stroking aggrandizing rather than pitching in for the world I want to create a la June Jordan. And there are days when my ofrenda at home, praying to my higher power for peace, is all I can seem to do outside of the near-constant state of working I’ve created for myself — with lots of help from the powers that be, of course.

But I don’t want to run myself into the ground. I want to stay active, I want to stay mobile, I want to show up, and, if you’ve read any of my other attempted treatises, you know I want you to do those things, too. Praxis and boldness, the kind of energy that made ACT OUT as powerful as it was in the 80s, is much the bedrock of my political ideology. Still, writer Dena Rod told me rest can be radical when the profit-motivated world demands you to stay up late.

So you could write an article like this for plenty of places, maybe the one that reminds you of those trappings of your back-water childhood. For me, taking a load off and spending a few bucks in San Francisco’s waterfront national park — simple rejuvenation when the body is ready to call it quits — Presidio Bowl is as good an oasis as they come.

Even the fries at Presidio Bowl are simpler — and that, too, is a good thing. (Paolo Bicchieri)

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