What is it about San Francisco that attracts and repels me?
Laura Fraser recently wrote:
San Francisco always tags along when I travel, eventually making me feel jaded about even the most exciting places. Paris seems so gray and serious next to San Francisco’s coastal light and whimsical dollhouses. Helsinki is matter-of-fact and boring compared to our free-spirited city. In Manhattan, 200 people snake in a line through Trader Joe’s just to buy dinner, the storied Greenmarket has paltry pickings compared with the Ferry Building, and the sidewalks are slush pools in winter (or it’s beastly hot and muggy in the summer). Don’t get me started on Los Angeles.
I've been feeling the lust. Have to have to have to get away. The need hammers into the my brain, memories and daydreams, like nails. Incessantly: On the tram, as I watch the drunk homeless guy dribble and drool in the sun; on my fire escape, while I wait for the southern skies to glow with dusky blues; or – and by far the best place for deep pondering kinds of thinking – on the porcelain throne, where silk caravans and musty souks and galloping nomads and the smells of strange food tumble out of travelogues and history books and magazine spreads.
I need to get away because I'm getting soft. My antennas to the world, it's problems and messiness, wilt without practice. I'm getting desensitized to realness, the sometimes necessary angst-ridden kind of wave that I used to ride before it crashed down on me and I needed to escape to a place just like San Francisco.
But I know my need to go is yanked back by my fondness for this city. I've gotten happier here, so why change? I'm more settled, balanced, optimistic. The Bay Area teems with people who come from elsewhere, secure in their belief that anything is possible, that side projects can become multi-million successes, hobbies can become careers, passions can become sustainable. Innovators, creators, designers – they flock here because the world is crummy and inefficient and exploitative and boring, and here is the one nexus where nothing else matters but the strength of your own guile and perseverance – a faith in your ideas to change all the shittiness of the world.
But there's a sense of smugness that comes with unbridled optimism. This is where righteous trends radiate like the self-assuredness that quality should not only triumph quantity but that it can be sustainable and affordable and democratic. The local produce craze, the self-preservation of artisanal businesses, the fiercely a priori truth of economic liberalism and social equalization -- these are all fruits of the same roots, springing from an abundance of land, wealth, and industry.
I keep thinking that stories don't come from good and sun-drenched lives. Great stories come from flawed people struggling within a imperfect environment where things go wrong; it's the wrong turns, the false wins, the stops and starts and the billowing clouds on the horizon come crashing down into a clapboard house sheltering cowering orphans -- those are the kinds of things that makes for good writing, that sears the creative humaness of our collective senses, that moves us and resonates and calls us to action.
So, in this place, I'm slowly losing the part of me that can feel and dream and believe, because I look outward at all the riches before me, and so all the stuff inside slowly stop growing, lying gray and cold.
Where to next?