STREETSIDE #4: How to hate a city

Okay, I'll do these every day, from now on.

I, Isaiah Dylan Clark, love art. I used to say I've been in love with it since... but I'd rather not consider myself "in love" with anything. My usual connotations of that negate the self-dependency I have to exercise.
I also used to kick myself for not doing shit when I was younger, but that's an impossible contest, right? Somebody started playing electric guitar when they were 4, somebody started tuning pianos when they were 3, somebody peed in a harmonica when they were 2, somebody was born when they were 1, somebody sang when they were born. There's a perfectly story-ass story within my experience as someone who started taking art seriously when they were 24.
I mean, it pales in comparison to what I do now, every day. Yesterday, and the day before, and every day before, especially after I became homeless. Well, not RIGHT after: there are no pearly gates to exit society. For my first year and a half, homeless, I dicked around... or should I say fucked around... well, both. I championed optimism and vied to escape materialism, but I also felt like I wasn't done with it yet and my optimism was backwards pessimism. Whatever I had and hadn't could explain everything. I never had faith in the past, present and future at once, nor space or patience, as much as I preached them.



At my storefront, today, I...
actually, this reminds me of these Latter-day Saints who stopped at my business the other day, who remind me that religion is transparent enough, to me, that it could take one or two individuals for me to start hating on a whole theology. These bitches... for all my feminist readers, these female bitches... do NOT take no for an answer, which really bothers me, as much as that might also bewilder any feminist readers to imagine a woman genuinely bothering a man for no good reason, but anywaaaaaays they deduced that I'm influenced by some faith, albeit a lack thereof. I was raised Christian, but my parents didn't just introduce me to Christianity: they interrogated me with their own versions of Christianity, which I snapped out of when I was 13, especially while associating my father's interpretation of Christianity with a therefore hypocritical (but always evil) history of emotionally and physically abusing the rest of my family. Lately, I've recognized my own interpretation of Christianity, including in the financial and spiritual ethics I connect to and preach about my business, and I'm comfortable sharing it with many customers!
I quickly changed my mind about these two.
I don't wanna say brainwashed because that would deny them their own independence, as if they don't decide how they feel because they feel a way about it. Ironically, though, that's not how they treated themselves, which I recognize as a typical American, monotheistic trend amongst "young" people.They never feel or care to find any reason for why and what they "think" of the religion they claim to, except for one reason: "because". Because it's right. Why should I believe in God? Uh, duh, cuz he's there. But if I don't believe, how do I believe? By believing. But I don't believe. Yes you do. No you don't. See, now you don't even know who's typing. This is how Jews get dehumanized and hunted in a holocaust that idiots across the world have the nerve to argue how many "didn't" die or if it even happened. This is how a lynching will take place in your town's own BART station decades ago and people will say "crazy times". This is how a president gets elected who pretends his own country is a civil war, and then incites his own country to civil war, and then pretends there's no civil war and then says that there's a civil war and then asks who started the civil war.
I fuckin hate wome- no, I'm kidding.
The bitches called again today. Not my father, the other two, and not two other fathers. I'm sure they'll remember the call badly, but I think it went well. I woke up with them on my mind, anyhow, and not because morning wood or that Genocide of White People that I'm Definitely Planning that I bet Elon Musk keeps talking about. I got one of their numbers at the end of our last/only interaction, at my business, about 10 days ago... oh yeah, I should finish that story. It surprised me how much we both hustled each other, or how it reminded me of the hustler I could surely be.
If people can feel trapped being alive, people can AT LEAST feel trapped in a polite conversation with businesspeople. Sure, you don't wanna downright say no and they look kinda cute anyways, I guess, because what they're dressed nice and not on crack? People deserve the right to live ajar, to be attracted and unattached. It might as well be pessimism and optimism, respectively, that I zigzag between considering MY job as "90% being ignored" versus "10% being loved" or whatever I'd call the latter, which I never thought of til now, what the 10% would be. I guess it has a nice ring to it, 90% ignored... it's so convenient to imagine that life is out to get you, and I could've capitalized ANY words in that last part.

When we last spoke, some 10 days ago, it seemed to me that their main, overwhelming, diabolically masterful mantra when approaching me was to congregate more fanbase or whatever the SuperMegaMormonSuperheroSquad calls themselves these days. I know that Netflix owns Disney and through that Subway and through that Morton Salt and through that Miller High Life and through that Michael Jackson and through that Dasani water and through that the moon Io, hence my stereotype of Latter-day Saints in Downtown Berkeley is that they're trying to own me.
On our call, today, I expressed delight to hear from them again. When I recognized them, I felt dread, and I felt ready to express it but I didn't know how... what better way to express dread than to... deal with it? It helped that I was high and drunk, plus shit was actively sliding out of my lower backside, which is nice, for a change, I think, so most of the conversation was pretty much "Hi, oh my gooaaawwwd girlie how you dooooin, did you hear the Knicks won" except the last part. It felt like the call ended when she asked me "Will I be seeing you today?", so I ended it. I told her she won't be seeing me again and I hung up without waiting a moment longer.



Okay.



I started STREETSIDE, or The Streetside Store (previously ...Library), on October 1st of 2024, outside of Oakland's Covenant House of California, a piece of shit shelter with a piece of shit system and some piece of shit staff and an entirely fuckin... you know what, it's aight.
Sometime in February of 2025 (I think I said January in one of these last entries, oopsies), I moved to Turning Point, a private shelter in Berkeley for 12 retarded jackasses (not legally retarded, either, just legally jackass), not to be associated with Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA, although that would've been awesome. I fuckin loved that guy. It sucks that he died... I didn't think I shot him that hard.

I run in front of the old Half Price Books,
Berkeley's, on Shattuck and Addison,
around where the hip, young people go to rot their brains and be hot and ugly.
I won't be there today, but I'm there just about everyday. I used to say otherwise, but that was to appease those who aren't fans, and I'm tired of judging my day based on the haters and not the fans. 6,000 people loved me enough to get a book in person, and probably like 5,000 of them paid for it, which is a good ratio to me. That's enough people that I would want to kill myself instead of count them all, so I could give a FUCK whatever number I could estimate of people who might hate me because I'm sure I wouldn't care to count them, either. If I'll prioritize fans or haters, I'll prioritize fans, but really I should prioritize myself. Two birds with one stone.



My art is pick-your-own-price. My work is pick-your-own-meaning. I think that both are the way that all business should be... well, I worked for Half Price Books for the last 10 months that they were here, as their Artist Section. If no business had traditional pricing or structure, we wouldn't have Half Price, but if nobody did pick-your-own-price, everything would be... commercial. What a material, oppressive world.
I will remain.
I will remain in Berkeley.
I will fight for Berkeley, whether I'm a hater or a lover, because it's a city. We are as much a badass place as we are an example of badassery everywhere and anywhere.





I will return on Saturday.

Also, my album will come out this summer.