You would kill me for this trip. I mean, you would absolutely lay into me for a thousand reasons. Not because of my profligacy, though you'd find an unbelievable amount to criticize there, but my idiocy, my incompetence, my laziness: Missing flights and full price for the new one, going to the ER at the first sign of a little trouble, skipping the concert I organized the whole trip for, being around so many friends who've gone back to chain smoking cigarettes, going back to drinking wine when it's so detrimental to my health (and not just a little, one night was a bottle worth, another day was half a large bottle of prosecco). I resisted the cigarettes completely, but the simple act of being around them pushed my voice down an octave. You might be a little more understanding about leaving my glasses in a lyft, that one I'm down on myself enough for, but you'd definitely be down on me for purchasing a bunch of pairs of reading glasses that aren't perfect when each pair is thirty bucks.
But this is the sort of trip you'd love: the events, the people watching, the history, the views. It's everything you could want. I'm sorry you were careful with your life. Care to what end? You were the type that would get more out of vacations and tourism than anyone: most people have no idea of the history they tour. They ooh and ah by the gravesides of writers and statesmen they'd never heard of; but by the time you realized what you'd missed, your health slowed down. No one is sorrier than me that you didn't take more vacations but... well... you were cheap. I'm not. You were all too responsible, I'm not. My father is dead and your death taught me that life is all too short. Maybe I'm having my mid-life crisis, but I'm going to have all the adventures you refused yourself.
I'm heading home right now on a train from New York and it's been twenty days. Twenty days! The longest I've been away from home in four years by a factor of well over two weeks! My own health took a turn for the much worse in your final years, and a few months after your passing I finally found a drug that keeps it mostly OK. I feel like life is just starting over now, and I'll have to be careful to not have a second half that will be as reckless and profligate as the first half was careful, lest the second half turn into a fourth quarter.
Oh my god: San Francisco. You took J and I to San Francisco in 2009: it was wonderful. Whatever skirmishes we might have had on the trip (I can't remember), you took us to show us what stuff may be lying out there. Maybe it was really for you, maybe you wanted to share memories with your children, but maybe it was to show J all the possibilities that lie out there post-college, and maybe it was to show me that there was as much beauty and glory in the history of America as there is in the Europe I longed to go to for more than three weeks every ten years, but it was a great trip. We saw a David Mamet play, we ate some of America's best (mildly priced) food, and we got thrown out of the Robert Mondavi winery. The scenery everywhere took your breath away be it the windy hills of the city or the glowing sunlight of Napa. A homeless man sang to me a serenade in the street and another one asked J to critique the quality of his mugshot. The moment I was to go into the City Lights Bookstore: spiritual home to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Korso, and at that moment out stepped David Gergen: press secretary to both Clinton and Reagan. It was as though DC invaded San Fran and I was an unwitting accomplice.
This time was shorter than the last two: just three days in American paradise. Even the sun in California is different: at all times you can literally see the sunlight. It doesn't just glow, it shines, not in the heavens above, but on the earth right next to you. The only other place I've seen anything like that is Italy. Even at sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit it's strong enough to bore red marks into your exposed skin, yet somehow if you don't have a jacket you freeze to death even on a summer night. Every moment in that city seems like an outdoor party. I was there for the 'Breakers Festival', a costume festival not unlike Mardi Gras, only with more nudity. I probably saw about fifty dongs that Sunday morning, most of them old gays, probably Boomers, trying to recapture their glory days. San Francisco, like everywhere, has gotten a little more puritan, and I doubt there were more than two or three nudists there under fifty. So much has the spirit of San Francisco changed that I even saw a straight couple make out in the Castro!
Even if San Francisco has changed, I don't understand how a place like that can exist. I've still never seen New Orleans or Charleston, but I have never seen a city in America that beautiful: maybe by a country mile. Even if the homeless are defecating right outside, even if a quart of milk costs a million dollars, every property is so well maintained, every townhouse seems painted a hundred colors, every restaurant has outdoor seating, every park seems to have a perfectly half and half mixture of pine trees and palm trees. It is that precise place in America where temperate meets tropics, and the climate creates a perfect city of a type that may not be seen anywhere else on earth.
But there's no such thing as 'real perfection', and such perfection can breed a kind of unreality. The spirit of San Francisco may have changed, but it is just as vivid today as in the sixties, and perhaps quite a bit more influential. The world can seem all too explicable when living in circumstances so ideal. On the one hand you have the tech sector, which seems to have crossed overnight from libertarian into authoritarian (as I'm pretty sure I predicted to you), on the other you have the very famous San Franciscan brand of leftist. There's a whole new generation of them now: simultaneously more puritan and decadent than ever: tattoos on three sleeves yet so scared of saying something inappropriate that their very smiles seem to indicate a kind of desperation; more self-righteous than ever, yet simultaneously more terrified. You'd bristle with contempt for all sides: their utopian beliefs, their line item ideologies, the very lack of concern for money which lets them stay in America's most expensive city. There was never a less Californian person than you. The only people in San Francisco you'd have sympathy for are the Asians: who still dress as though America is in the 1950s, the young among whom carry themselves with that very middle class confidence which tells the world that they are the ones who truly run it. White people in San Francisco all have weird ass hair and bad tattoos, and at times they all look a little insecure. The Asians right next to them look happy as clams: hanging out with each other in a country that even in its depleted state is at least more distant from the threat of the Chinese government.
I certainly had moments of impatience I did my best to hide from San Francisco and all its mental baggage: be it a friend gone right-wing, one I'd rarely ever seen get heated in twenty five years, who heatedly asserted to me that liberals have controlled the Supreme Court for sixty years (why not seventy=five years then?), or his left friend who asserted to me that Israel is an ethnonationalist state in its very creation and only seemed to get madder with every calm contradiction I tried to make to points even he acknowledged were not particularly informed. Alcohol doesn't help in those situations, but one has the sense that whatever circles one moves in, the Bay Area is so ideologically lock stepped that they forget what it's like to talk with those who disagree with them. Those of us who live among disagreement every day and conscious of our surroundings realize that you have to approach political discourse as though you're walking through a landmine territory, where any footstep can cause a destructive explosion. But in such idyllic surroundings, it's very easy to think you don't have to be careful.
But I have a certain sympathy with all of them. You try being from my generation and see how you'd take to it. I have the same deep terror of Silicon Valley we all do, but at least they're trying to solve problems, even if it's increasingly the problems they create, in a country where we've given up on solving problems almost entirely. As for the leftists, well, there is something about the intractability of modern America that pushes everybody to extremes: left and right. They think the country lied to them, and they're right. My generation was told there would be jobs, there would be prosperity, that our educations were worth something, that all those years spent prepping for college with extra-curriculars and volunteer work would pay off: then we took out massive student loans we couldn't pay because we all thought we were going to get high paying jobs. Where is all that money? It's all concentrated in 930 billionaires. Anybody who blames millennials for turning left without looking into themselves is doomed to worsen the problem.
Boomer center-liberals like you chose your prosperity over making society work, so when pragmatists who know how to fix things choose their prosperity over solving society's problems, people inevitably flock to radical solutions. This is the world we now live in. It's sad to see hubristic friends who should know better be so heedless of history, but what can we do? The J Tuckers of the world told us to work hard, because hard work was what worked for you. We're not lazy, we just know that hard work won't be rewarded anymore.
Nothing is more fragile than beauty, and there is something truly fragile about San Francisco. The very glory of it feels like it's running on borrowed time. Just like how cities as beautiful as old Dresden, old Warsaw, old Tokyo and Rotterdam were bombed to ember (Paris and Prague almost were too), the most beautiful cities in America seem the most threatened: either from war with China like San Francisco and Portland, or from civil conflict like Austin and Nashville, or even rural California. These are places much more dangerous than they look. Not yet, but if life gets still more unstable than it currently seems, it won't be places like Baltimore or Detroit which opponents will look to destroy. Why bomb something that already looks bombed out?
Perhaps Denver tomorrow...
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