Some days I have a morning like I had today, and I get to thinking that for half a dollar, I’d move out of San Francisco tomorrow. Maybe I’m just getting old and cranky, but being a resident of a large, urban area seems less and less worth the effort with each passing year…
it’s more pronounced since I’ve been spending so much time in the relative sanity of the Central Valley the last few months, but it’s been building for quite a while. There’s just not much here which excites me enough to compensate for the fact that living in a crowded, compact place like San Francisco is a bit of a pain in the ass…
I crave the ability to park within a block of my house. And to actually HAVE a house, rather than to pay rent which would cover a nice mortgage anyplace else. I fantasize about not having to stand in long lines everyplace and not ending up in a homicidal rage if I decide to go to the Safeway earlier than 10PM…
I no longer want to wait 45 minutes for buses which are supposed to run at 10-minute intervals, nor to be packed into these buses like sardines with people who never learned the basics of personal hygeine and etiquette. I’m tired of being panhandled twice in every block and of never being able to light a cigarette without some complete stranger walking up and assuming I owe him one too…
I am not impressed with the ability to walk to a corner store and pay nine dollars for a box of stale corn flakes and four dollars for a quart of curdled milk. I am also unimpressed with the array of pretentious and overpriced restaurants at my disposal. The fact that I can walk a block and have sex with a speed freak in a dark bar also holds very little charm anymore…
The cable sucks. The newspaper sucks. Getting from point A to point B is difficult enough, and dealing with point B once you arrive is even worse. There WILL be a line, no matter what the establishment, and it WILL be full of people in big, ugly square-toed shoes who have “issues” with everything from the service to the chemical content of their braised tofu to their parents, and will spend ten minutes discussing these issues in the most annoying and long-winded terms possible, everyone else in line be damned…
I want to pay reasonable amounts for groceries and gas (and housing). I want to go to Target on a whim without it seeming like an expedition to Mars, and with the assumption that I’ll be able to splash down somewhere near where I live when I get back. And I want never to get on a bus again unless it’s by my choice and at my leisure.
I imagine I’ll get arguments from the “urban sophisticates” who believe all civilization ends at the SF city limits (or even worse, at Twin Peaks and Bernal Heights). Tough. I don’t go to art museums nor to the symphony. I don’t shop at any of the trendy boutiques in Union Square. I frankly don’t care how much of a “gay community” I’m surrounded by. I don’t go to nightclubs with $15 covers and $20 cocktails. My lifestyle does not require a large selection of headshops, leather shops, and gourmet cookware stores. I do not crave constant interaction with “colorful” (read “crazy”) people, and I do not believe that stepping in human excrement or syringes on the street adds anything particularly beneficial to my life…
There’s basically almost nothing I do here which I couldn’t do just about as efficiently in any mid-sized city in the country. So why I am I here? Inertia and the weather. That’s about it, and they’re both losing their grip on me…