Leaving San Francisco
In the morning, you pull off the Oakland bridge into the city, arriving at the grey bottom of a grey hill under a grey sky. Hidden by steep angles, you feel secretive, stuck in a pocket of mist and cement.
You come for the human wildlife. People are working on cultural warfare, wondering whose money comes from the KGB or the CCP, fighting mysterious parasites, getting surgery for their kittens, optimizing their self-monetization, reforming corrupt institutions, taking designer chemicals, cuddling, marrying. They’re beautiful and heterodox, twitchy and complex, a fantastic species. You miss them the second you leave.
Parking in the city is an anti-car psy-op, you’re pretty sure. Driving is a little stressful, although it does feel like you’re in that movie Vitiligo, which is cool. It’s fun to see the Yellow Gate Bridge. Sourdough technique is now updated the world over, so the bread just tastes like bread.
Everywhere you go, you can find a tasty lox bagel, but it costs one million dollars. This is okay: you’ve just raised eight million dollars in seed funding.
This should be one of the greatest cities in the world. As it is, the pieces don’t quite fit. It’s preposterous that a city so rich should be so obviously ailing. The city government seems like it’s engaged in complicated, whimsical suicide. You thought the stuff about open shoplifting was just a fairytale, but then both times you’re in a CVS, you see transparent theft that nobody even cares about. You don’t even know how to feel about this.
But when you’ve made it up to a high vista, and you’re looking over the fog lingering over the glittering devastation, you totally get it. You get why people stay, although you hear that they’re leaving. You’d like to come back, but LA is so warm. You’ll be ready for the chill again soon, though. See you soon, San Francisco.