Update, 10.13.23: Out the car window, the sidewalks are strewn with the lost and the damned: They are now called "the unhoused." Some live by night in four star hotel rooms, by day in their own squalor, in a city woke-choking itself to death, here in the State of Insanity. In the civic center area, block after block are so littered of human debris as to look like the stage set of a nightmare film in the making. If you promise sanctuary, food and drugs, drivers licenses and medical care to everyone -- citizen or not, they will come.
Update, 6.17.23: You may have heard of major commercial renters in downtown San Francisco leaving for other horizons less freaky than here. Every time the place loses another high-end retailer, or the Giants baseball team fails to sign a star payer, the locals mull over all the reasons, but rarely if ever do they face the real culprit: Themselves. Their smug addiction to woke idiocy and destruction, epitomized by their current groveling to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, is repelling the public at large.
SAN FRANCISCO, ONCE the enchanted city of my boyhood, is sinking deeper into greed, decadence and the insane building mania over land fill that may one day turn tragically soft under the wrong earthquake. A PBS Nova report some time ago raised the sobering possibility.
ON A RECENT VISIT to Baghdad across the bay, I grew instantly dizzy and vaguely disoriented, assaulted by jackhammers pounding, angry cars flying through intersections, building cranes shifting ominously overhead. Will the madness ever end? At Market, I ran for a bus which took me through what felt like the aftermath of a local war — more demolition and/or construction under way, more filth and litter along streets ruled by human slugs. If you plan on visiting the central library, you might consider bringing your own porta-potty. Ikea?
THE FREAK SHOW that has been San Francisco ever since the sixties is only getting freakier. Halloween every day? Barnum could not have competed with the emerging class here of self-defining characters, each his/her/its own universe. But the clever Barnum might have rented space nearby and offered them free living quarters with wide window views -- of ticketed museum-goers passing by.
HOW TO KNOW who they are? I wonder what the average old-world Joe from out of town is to do when facing a woman on a pre-arranged date, or by accident, but now feeling uneasy about said mortal’s true nature? Does he outright ask? Good grief, he’d risk getting arrested for sexual harassment. In this mind-boggling new world disorder where new gender options are being added to the pool daily, perhaps Apple will come up with a new app, GAB--Gender at Birth, a device to detect the native truth of the person before you. Of course, said person might have an app designed to thwart the signals from yours. But then again, here you just might meet the freak of your dreams.
LET ME GET to the point: San Francesco is a moral toilet. Sample exhibit: I remember when Willie Brown was elected ‘Da Mayor and, soon after, as reported, he attended a late night private party at which one man stripped to the waist and bore the sliding knife of another against his willing back, while a third urinated into the fresh blood stream. On a local radio talk show soon after, the righteous indignation of Bernie Ward, who also hosted God Talk on Sundays, was answered by the ‘Da Mayor telling Ward to mind his own damn business. Ward, minding his own damn business, was later convicted of circulating child pornography on the internet, and sent to prison.
BUT THE EGALITARIAN toilet on ground level is safely avoided by the billionaire renters above living in higher realms behind glass and steel and praying for structural stability. You’ve heard of the sinking tower of condo? Another new monster showoff, the Trans Bay Terminal, has likewise shown evidence of shoddy construction with the shocking discovery of cracks in two critical brand new beams. This multi billion dollar extravaganza was designed to host the L.A.to SF bullet trains championed by CA Gov, Jerry “moonbeam” Brown, trains stalled in state-wide litigation that may never arrive. The terminal's proximity to the sinking condo — which now also shreds cracked glass -- has caused people to fear that other new high rise darlings may likewise be perilously compromised below street level. Oh, the irony of it all. Imagine New York's Grand Central Terminal exclusively hosting but one occupant: Greyhound Bus Lines.
SO, FOR NOW, while the Transbay beauty is shut down for repairs, the old “temporary” outdoor East Bay bus station is back in use. How relieved and happy I felt to be leaving San Francisco on a bus bound for Oakland’s idyllic Piedmont Avenue neighborhood. Sanity and peace. Oh, what a joy is simplicity! The sunshine never felt better.
10.20.18
No comments:
Post a Comment