Oakland, to me, has always felt like that self-destructive friend, the one with all the potential in the world but somehow stuck in a cycle of one step forward, two steps back. You catch glimpses of what it could be, but it never quite gets there.

Yet, even in the middle of the grind, there’s creativity. There’s hustle. In a city where too many people make a living by making someone else’s day worse, there are still those trying to bring something different,something fun, something entertaining. They call it turfing, a dance style born on the Oakland streets. I’d see them nearly daily on my commute, running their act for an audience that barely looked up. It got repetitive, but the grind was real. And I respected that.