Devine Double-cross
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It is gray and cold in San Francisco today, which means it must be summer time.
I have long accused Gawd of playing one specific cruel trick on every human he assembles. In my case he made me a Southern gentleman who respects and honors the softer sex, yet also made me overtly amorous, resulting in the innate instinct to bed most of the world’s women and yet ethically restrained from doing so – a lifetime of teal tinged testes. The Old Man Above made Bill Clinton a billy goat too, but instead of sexual ethics gave him a lust for chubby woman, which might be the worse of our fates.
It occurs to me that perhaps Yahweh might get yucks from inflicting similar ironies on urban settings. Chicago received a huge industrial economic base and a political infestation to remove all the wealth industry created. New York was granted a cosmopolitan vibe with a rich arts culture and a population of hard people whose main mission is to suck the art out of life. Hollywood has gobs of image and no soul. Washington got power san a conscious.
San Francisco was awarded a beautiful landscape and enough fog to conceal it. Scenic San Francisco vistas are vacated by summer temperatures that make Alaskan’s shiver (yet people run around naked here is alarmingly large numbers).
While researching my next book (whose subtitle is an insider outs San Francisco) I discovered that San Francisco’s central essence is irony. It is a town torn between anarchy and fascism, spiritualism and salacity, free love and expensive parking. In San Francisco for every action there is an equal and opposite overreaction. Familiarity may breed contempt (and children) but San Francisco breeds contradiction.
Contradictions are, in no small part, responsible for San Francisco being both prototypically American and not American at all. San Francisco revels and rebels in freedom providing you don’t smoke (tobacco) in public, recycle and compost, and never vote Republican. This pull between a yen for the freedom to be yourself and civic censure of anyone one free enough to be politically incorrect makes San Francisco America’s bastard step-sister. As the master Mencken mentioned about San Francisco “What fetched me instantly … was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.”
In San Francisco your banker wears tie dye t-shirts and streetwalkers wear diamonds. The best bars are dives and the best music comes from buskers. The best scenery is on the costal cliffs, which the prevailing fog prevents you from seeing except on October 12th. This town is irony in action, a perpetual self contraction. Perhaps Allah’s ambush on Frisco was to give it a split personality where each bipolar part is itself insane. Yes, if you can deal with The City’s imbecilities it is an entertaining place. Just keep your hands in the ride at all times.
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