Daydreamer

Posted On February 23, 2021

I’ve found myself in a new role at work this year. I translate blueprints into construction schedules. A lot of staring into computer monitors. Actually, I’m only staring into computer monitors. Blueprints these days aren’t what you might envision. They aren’t the lovely, unwieldy paper drawings that I can make notes on, or color in, or casually flip like a good book. Just like our currency, blueprints have gone the digital route.

The first few days of this new gig were rough for me. Sitting still for so long. Clicking and more clicking of the mouse while staring at a computer screen. But soon, my body became accustomed to the long sedentary hours where I delve into un-built buildings as if slipping into “the matrix”.

I’ve always been a bit of a daydreamer. Now I get paid to do it. Paid to dream up ways to build.

In tandem with creating these schedules I do logistics plans. This is where I imagine where the crane would be located, how many lanes of a street we’d beg the city to take. What part of the building we will install the temporary construction elevator. Where the pedestrians will be rerouted. Where our gates and delivery areas will be located. I’ll mark all of this up on a set of plans and we make it look professional so we can hopefully sell ourselves to a potential client.

If the job is serious, I’ll even go down to the site of the future project to walk around and take measurements of the sidewalks and side streets. Take photos of obstructions. Then I can scale the logistics drawings to make sure they’ll really work.

When I go down to these future sites. There’s usually existing buildings in place. Buildings with businesses. Buildings full of people.

Do these people know that I just spent days of my life imagining building a high rise right in their place of business or home? I’ve made plans to destroy the way they live their lives like some god of chaos. They have no clue that I’ve scheduled out the demolition of their current place of work, two weeks tops and we’ll have that century old building down, if there’s no asbestos.

What will they do? Where will they go?

The workers and locals who inhabit these buildings eye me wearily when I loiter around snapping photos on my iphone. It’s as though I’ve come from the future and know their fate before they do.

I almost want to warn them. I imagine myself running into one of these businesses and shaking the owner, or anyone I can find by the shoulders:

A wrecking ball will be knocking down your brick building in six months! This building that you’re making a living from has been sold. Some rich guys will develop this piece of land into 500 shiny condos. Your life is about to change dramatically, do you know that? Do you?

They’re mom and pop businesses. They always are.

Dilapidated Tae Kwan Do training centers. Carpet whole sellers with dirty windows and peeling advertisement plastered on the doors. Auto body yards with real junk yard dogs and fenders laying half stacked near rusted gates that don’t close all the way. Marijuana dispensaries. Warehouses. Coffee roasters.

They’re places from another San Francisco. A dying San Francisco.

Every neighborhood in this gritty and shiny city has a long and rough history. Some neighborhoods are valued for their history and others can’t be rebuilt fast enough. San Franciscans have always been in search of more space. When the city was new, they took to filling in the shallow bay with landfill to create more land. A lot of these buildings rest on this Bay Mud. Sometimes we find the graves of sunken clipper ships and horse carriages when we dig down into this mud to make room for parking garages. It’s the type of soil that will liquefy during a quake and is brimming with brackish water only 6 feet down.

All it takes is one new building to change an entire neighborhood.

The domino effect. My father, who was raised in the projects of Hunters Point and the working class Mission District when Army Street was still alive, told me this once on my first job with him in SOMA. The building we were building was fantastically tall and expensive, but surrounded by old bars, hourly hotels, and alleyways filled with humans in different stages of consciousness.

How could this one building change this neighborhood? Who the hell would want walk out of their front door to this? I remember thinking.

Well, it turned out to be true, the entire neighborhood has now changed around that one building. What was once a series of old rusted industrial neighborhoods are now sterile modern condos with joggers and yoga enthusiasts spotting the fresh concrete sidewalks.

Some neighborhoods in the city won’t change. Just the inhabitants do. The Mission comes to mind. Those with money want a neighborhood’s vibe, the culture, the food, the history. And so they out bid each other for a small piece of it. And in turn shut out the people who made the neighborhood what it was by inadvertently erecting invisible walls made of money. But this is how San Francisco works. This must happen.

The day nobody builds in San Francisco will be a very sad day.

So here I am. Daydreaming up a new San Francisco. Scheduling the city’s future. At the heart of it, this is what San Francisco has always been. A city built on day dreams. A city built on mud. On the prospect of gold. Of safe harbor. A Native American settlement, a Spanish missionary outpost, a Mexican town, and now an American city. The city is layered, and I’m just a single cell of a layer that will soon be buried by another.

This is how we weave our stories into the city and make it our own. Whether its a fire or earthquake…or developer, buildings will be knocked down and rebuilt. I’m happy that I get to be a part of the future and history of San Francisco. A city that welcomed my father’s family, freshly arrived from Mexico and the fields of the central valley and allowed us to prosper.

When we go to the city, my daughters happily point out each tall building I’ve built and I can do the same for my father’s buildings. These union buildings kept a roof over my head growing up, food on the table, and now they’re doing the same for my daughters.

I’ll have concrete and steel structures that will namelessly hold a sliver of my soul long after I’m gone, maybe even some dried blood. Every building I’ve built, I leave a little footprint behind as a legacy for decades or centuries to come. All of us construction workers do. That is till the building is knocked down and the cycle starts anew.

Planning vs Executing

It’s not all fun and sunshine daydreaming up schedules for a living. I can feel the gravity of staring at a computer screen all day slowly taking its toll–and its only been a few weeks! It’s no wonder that FIRE became so popular among tech workers. They have the perfect recipe for FIRE. A good salary and the slow death of wasting away in front of a computer can make anyone dream of financial independence.

This computer work is a lot like commuting. I sort of zone out and forget where I am, while not moving, yet my mind is running at full speed. Kudos to the office workers who I used to make fun of for complaining about “working hard”. I apologize. Staring at a screen all day is tough. There’s no real road blocks stopping you from getting your work done, except your human need to move and maybe get some sun. It’s easy to lose hours of your life without realizing it.

So as I plan building imaginary buildings, I’m also continuing to plan my escape. Daydreaming of the day I’ll hand in my resignation letter to retire in my forties.

There’s a heavy sense of contentment that comes from meticulously planning for something, then executing your plan. Even with vacations, there’s times when I feel as if planning for the trip can be just as enjoyable as taking the trip. The possibilities are endless when you’re planning. There’s that slim chance that everything will go per plan and you won’t have to worry about a thing.

Because we all know nothing really does go per plan. Construction. Vacation. Investments. Life. There’s just too many variables for plans to go as scheduled. Too many humans are involved. Having flexibility built into your schedule is probably the best kind of schedule.

Daydreaming up a future is perfectly fine as long as it doesn’t become a pipe dream. The hard part is knowing when to stop daydreaming and when to start taking action. Too much daydreaming will get us nowhere in life. That is unless you can find a job that will pay you to do it.

How often do your plans go per plan? Are you a believer in trying to stick to plans or do you go with the flow once things start to change? How much has the city you grew up in changed over the years?