This is my mash note to San Francisco and the Bay Area. I love this place. Moved here from Wisconsin in 1979, and ever since, I’ve been a passionate advocate, hoping to win the rare fictional designation of Honorary Native. My affection and appreciation for this teetering peninsula and environs lives on for many reasons: the fog, the food, the views, the climate, but it always comes back to— the people — the tolerant denizens who were lucky enough to be born here and we transplants (the wretched refuse you hear so much about.) Outcasts and misfits and round pegs that rattled around the square holes, they used to contain us in our hometowns. But we all heard the secret silent sirenic call of the 415. No one knows what it says or where it comes from, but it definitely exists. Which is why so many villages in the Midwest are missing their idiots. Maybe in 200 years they will discover the seductive tone produced when the wind blows through the Golden Gate at a certain speed in March or the cables of the GGB vibrate in a harmonic convergence or that the god who lives inside of Mount Tam whispers loudly or that Sutro is an actual alien or echoes of the Gold Rush reverberate. But you don’t end up here accidentally. The beatniks, the hippies, the tech bros, the gender refugees are heeding a higher calling. Now, the realization of how difficult it is to manage a city full of fairies and sprites and spirits and individuals thinking 20 years into the future is undergoing its regular 30-year cycle of doubt, but things will shake out as they have before and will again. Thank you, San Francisco. I love your sights and your sounds and your smells. And I am not alone. Long may you host and foster the marginalized.
