#OCCUPYOAKLAND

I lived in Oakland for three years, but always as a transient.  I was from somewhere else.  I was going somewhere else.  I just hadn't done it yet.  Oakland was never mine, and I never loved it.  I complained about weather, and BART hours, and politics, and weather.  And then I did leave, four years ago, and I stayed gone. 

And yet I find now that I am from Oakland, as much as I am from Poway or Baltimore, or when I travel these days, and say that I am from Iowa.  The place is embedded in my history, my habits, my expectations of the world.  When something happens in Oakland, to Oakland, I take it personally.  Even from 2000 miles away.