37. On Homelessness

Tags

chickens, homeless, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Missoula, prison, Steinbeck

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” – Anatole France

A while ago I posted to this blog a piece advocating the slaughter of our nation’s homeless masses as part of the solution to America’s most troubling economic problems.  The piece was satire and my audience seemed to appreciate it, although one of my more conservative friends (yes, I do have several) later told me that he enjoyed my piece immensely until he realized that I was joking.  Joking or not (and, for the record, yes, I was joking), I suppose there is some irony in the fact that the very next day I had what was, to date, the longest one-on-one encounter I’ve ever had with a homeless person.  I’d like to share that experience with all of you while it is still fresh in my mind.  [Note: I started writing this piece a month ago and then work consumed my life…you know how it is.  The memory is still there…it just might be slightly tweaked, that’s all.]

There’s a café around the corner from my apartment called Café Mercury.  I go there for lunch at least one weekend day pretty much every week, and always order the caprese sandwich on a French roll, which is served with a small salad.  The whole plate is drowning in olive oil and balsamic vinegar and it tastes like heaven.  I often bring a book to the café, or a crossword puzzle, or sometimes my laptop (yes, it was in this café that I wrote that particularly fun and creepy post about the pretty girls of San Francisco I’ve gone back to the café nearly every week and have yet to see either of those two women again.)  I went last Saturday and brought my book, but after finishing my sandwich I realized it was truly glorious outside, so I decided to try reading in the little Hayes Valley park—you know, next to Smitten the beer garden (something bothers me about calling it a “biergarten”—I’m normally all about using the ethnic names but for whatever reason it seems so pretentious in this case, even for me).

The park was crowded, but I managed to find an empty bench in the sun.  It was one of those perfect SF spring days when it’s sunny and beautiful and the clean air smells like fresh laundry, but it’s not at all hot so you can be perfectly comfortable in jeans and a sweatshirt and your Keens.  Yes, I wear Keens.  I pulled out my book, went to the page held by my Book Passage bookmark, retrieved the bookmark, and placed it in the back of the book while holding my current page with my pinky finger so I could read it several seconds later.  You’ll understand why these details are important in the next paragraph.

I had scarcely read half a page when a man sat down on the bench next to me and immediately asked, “hey, why do you have the bookmark in the back of the book and not on the page you’re reading?”  This question struck me as incredibly moronic.  Who the hell keeps a bookmark on the page he’s reading at all times?  Doesn’t everybody stick their bookmarks in the backs of books when reading?  I glanced over to my left and out of the corner of my eye noticed that my companion on the bench was a homeless man. I shifted my gaze back to my book and said, in a quiet but assertive voice, “I’m keeping my bookmark in the back of my book while I read.  When I’m finished, I’ll retrieve the bookmark and place it after the last page I read.  To ‘mark’ my page, if you will.”

“Oh, that makes sense. What are you reading?  Is it any good?”  I’m normally pretty social, but I was in no mood to engage in a conversation with a homeless man.  Not today, not on a rare day off from work when the sun is shining in San Francisco.  I knew I couldn’t just pretend I didn’t hear him, so I answered him rather curtly.  “It’s called ‘Swamplandia!’ by Karen Russell.  I like it.”
“Who are your favorite authors?”  Was this guy fucking kidding me?  “I don’t know, I tend to like books more than authors, but I guess Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut.”
“Oh.  Who’s Margaret…what was her name?”
“Margaret Atwood.  She wrote Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, two of my favorite dystopian novels.”  My gaze was glued on my page, hoping that somehow, if I didn’t look up, the guy would leave me alone.  I was starting to smell the cheap red wine on his breath.
“I like Bukowski.” Of course he did. “And Steinbeck.  I used to love to read Steinbeck, but it’s hard to read when somebody keeps talking to you.  Am I bothering you?  I don’t mean to bother you, I just wanted to know what you were reading.”  I put my book down, but kept my eyes pointed straight forward and not at my inebriated conversation partner.  Yeah, he was definitely inebreiated.
“What’s your favorite Steinbeck book?”
“Huh?”
“You said Steinbeck was your favorite author.  What’s your favorite book by him?  Mine is East of Eden.  It’s one of my favorite books of all time.”
“I love East of Eden!  I even memorized a chapter.”  He started reciting.  I don’t remember what he said.  I was contemplating Googling East of Eden right now and then copying the first lines that come up, but that would be dishonest to you, fair reader.  And you know that I would never, ever lie to you.

Although I don’t remember which chapter he quoted or how it went (I read East of Eden in high school and don’t remember much more than “Timshel!” and the fact that I really loved it), I was very impressed.  I lifted my head up and got my first good look at my benchmate.  He was tall, and kind of pudgy, wearing a dirty olive green sweater and faded blue jeans caked with mud.  His hands were huge, and rough, callused and covered in dust.  He had a very scruffy red beard and natty read hair peeked out from under his plain brown baseball cap.  His face was covered with a mix of freckles, scrapes, scabs and scars, and his teeth were yellow and rotten.  His tongue was purple from the cheap fortified wine he was drinking out of a Welch’s grape juice bottle.

“Not bad,” I told him.
“But my favorite Steinbeck book is Grapes of Wrath.  I memorized a whole lotta that book, too, I read it so many goddamn times.”
“I didn’t like it.  Couldn’t get into it.”  It’s true—in fact, I never finished it.  I got about half-way and then gave up.  Then again, that was when I was 14 or 15.  I should try it again now.
“How could you not like it?  It’s the story of the romanticism of the American West!”
“Is that right?”
“Nomads, like me.  Just travelin’ round the country with no real cause.”
“Weren’t they migrant farmers?”
“But you know what I mean.  About the traveling around part, at least.”
“How did you come to San Francisco?”
“First time I came here was on a freight train.  This time I came in a car.  I got a ride up from San Diego with my friend’s brother.  My friend is Belinda.  Have you seen her around?  She’s this one-legged lesbian punk rocker with a bleached blond mohawk.  Sometimes she’s at Market and Gough, and we panhandle together.  Maybe you’ve seen me—I have a sign that says ‘Ugly, Broke and Sober.”  Me and Belinda been friends for a long time.  Hell, I was friends with her when she had two legs!”
“How did she lose her leg?”
“Hopping a train.  She tried to hop in the boxer, the idiot.  You NEVER go for the boxer.  I always go for the unit.”
“The unit?”
“It’s the car up front.  There are usually one or two of them, sometimes three.  And they have seats that are pretty comfortable, and a bathroom—it doesn’t have running water, but it’s better than trying to shit out the side of a boxer.  And there’s a first aid kit, so you can wash off your hands with rubbing alcohol.  And the best part is that it’s easier to board than the boxer!”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah!  You just wait in the bushes for the engineer and other guys to get on the front, then you can hop up the stairs in the next car.  There’s a little ladder for you to hold onto and everything.”
“And nobody is in the next car?”
“Nope.  All of the train folks are in the very front car, but there’s usually another one or two units that are empty.”
“What if you get caught?”
“I mean, the engineer usually comes by, but he doesn’t mind.  Sometimes he’ll bring you food too.  They’re usually pretty nice.  The only guy you gotta watch out for is the pitbull.  The railroad cop.”

My homeless companion started staring off into space, and then took another huge swig from his grape juice bottle.  At that point I put my book down.

“You’ve ridden on a lot of trains, huh?”
“Yup.  I’ve never been across the ocean, but I’ve been to every single state except for Florida, South Carolina, and Hawaii, and the only reason I ain’t been to Hawaii is cuz no freight train goes there…yet!”
“So what’s your name?”
“My name is Richard Michael Touchey, Jr.”
“What a coincidence.  My middle name is Michael too!”
“Oh yeah?  What’s your first and last name?”
“J and K.”
“J Michael K.  Very biblical sounding.”
“Well, I am Jewish.”
“Oh yeah? I’m Italian.  Or at least part Italian, I think.  That’s where I get my olive skin.  Well, it also comes from sleeping on the streets.  That makes you all ashy, like me.  Hey!” he called out to a smoker passing by.  “Gotta an extra cigarette?”  The smoker didn’t look at him.  “I guess not.”  Richard turned back to me.  “You wanna know my favorite alias?”
“Yes?”
“David Bryce Cooper.” Pause.
“…Should I know who that is?”
“When the cops stop me, I tell them my name is David Bryce Cooper, and then I sign my name D.B. Cooper!”  And that, my friends, is awesome.
“That’s awesome.”
“Yeah.  Most of the time the cops don’t get it, but one time one did and he started laughing.”  Cops today are young, keep in mind.  Younger than us.  And if you’re my age, don’t feel bad if you don’t know who D.B. Cooper is.  I only know ‘cuz of my dad.

“And then look at my backpack!  It’s got two names on it, and neither of ‘em are mine.  There’s this one on the front—he’s the original owner of the backpack I think.  But then this one on the back is my friend Shelly.  She gave me this backpack.  She’s in Seattle now but I really hope she comes down for my birthday.”
“When’s that?”
“July 12^th.”
“No shit—mine’s on July 13^th!”  Richard got excited and flashed a huge grin, then put out his fist for me to pound (or “fist-bump,” if you prefer).  I gave him the rock.  His knuckles were extremely rough; it felt like punching sandpaper. “How old are you gonna be?” I asked.
“40.”
“That’s a big one!”
“Sure is.  I remember when I turned 30.  I spent the whole night trying to hook up with this girl.  I didn’t that night, but then we did a little later.  Then I hooked up with this girl who was my best girl friend.  Not my girlfriend, like, my friend who was a girl.”
“Oh yeah?  How did that turn out?”
“I think it coulda been really good, but I fucked it up.”
“Oh yeah?  How so?”
“When I went to prison, I chose another girl instead of her.  This new girl was nice and all, for a while she sent me letters and money.  Then she stopped.  The other girl, the one who was my best friend…she was the sweetest girl in the world, and I fucked it all up…”

I certainly did not want to get into a conversation about fucking it all up with sweet girls…I spend more than enough time thinking and talking about that as it is.  I changed the subject to one I found more interesting. “When and where were you in prison?”
“I’ve been in 11 different correctional facilities, for, let’s see…I did 3 and a half years the first time, a year the second time, and then little stints here and there…maybe I’ve spent 6 or 7 or 8 years of my life behind bars.  I don’t know.”
“Oh yeah?  How is it?”
“Fucking sucks, man.  I ain’t never going back, not if I can help it.”  I have often heard conservatives complain that prisoners have it so good, with their flat-screen TVs and 3 meals a day, at the taxpayer’s dollar.  I challenge any of those conservatives to spend one night in prison.  One night, and then tell me how great it is.  If you don’t like spending your tax dollars on prisoners, then stop sending people to prison.

Richard told me more about prison and incarceration in general.  He said the first time he went to jail was when he was 17, for beating some kid up at school.  “They sent you to jail for a schoolyard fight?”
“Yeah, it was bullshit, but my dad had a bad name around town, and everybody associated me with him so they were trying to make my life miserable.”
“What town?”
“Missoula, Montana!  Shitty place.”
“I’ve heard Montana is beautiful.”
“It is!  Not Missoula, but the rest of the state.  We used to go to this river to go swimming, and…”  At this point, Richard told a long story about going skinny dipping in ice cold water.  When he started telling the story, it was as if he suddenly became incredibly drunk, or rather, that he had been able to contain his drunkenness for a while, but his self-control fell apart when reminiscing about the halcyon days of this youth.  I tuned out—there’s only so much mindless babbling I can take.  At one point a pretty girl walked by with a cigarette and Richard asked her for one, with quite a bit of slobber. She pretended not to see or hear him.

He eventually noticed that he had become incoherent, and tried to steer me back into the conversation.  “Hey, wanna hear a joke?”
“Sure, I love jokes.”  I really do.
“Okay…okay.  I see you got that bald spot, so here’s what you do.  Don’t use Rogaine or any of that shit.  Here’s what you do.  You get a piece of bologna and put it right on the bald spot, okay?  Then you put on a hat, and you wear your hat on the bologna on your bald spot for 2 weeks.  Don’t take of the hat and don’t wash your hair or nothin’.  Then, in two weeks, when you take off your hat, your hair will be bologna in the wind!”
Not only was the joke not funny, but it kind of pissed me off, because I’m pretty self conscious about my bald spot.  “That was your joke?  That wasn’t funny, Richard.”
“Wait, wait, I gotta another one.  Wanna hear?”
“Okay, but if it’s as bad as that last one, I’m leaving.”
“Did you know that chickens die after sex?”
“No.”
“Well, they do after I fuck ‘em!”  Now that, my friends, was my kind of joke!
“That’s pretty good, I got one too.  What’s the hardest part about eating a vegetable?”  Thus began our game of “joke tennis.”  This is when you keep telling jokes back and forth until one person runs out.  I’m really good at joke tennis.  After the vegetable joke, he told an oldie-but-goodie about pedophilia that I had been telling since I was 14.  That exhausted Richard’s joke arsenal, but I told a few more.  The jokes I told were a little too inappropriate for this blog, but my “winner” for our game of joke tennis had the punch line “twenty-seven.” Shoot me an email and I’ll tell you the first part…although it’s really one of those jokes that is best told in person.

Just me and a homeless dude, sitting on a park bench in Hayes Valley, telling dirty jokes.

An elderly Chinese man walked past us, smoking a particularly smelly cigarette.  Richard asked him for one, and he stopped, gave Richard the stink eye, spit on the ground, and walked away.  At that point, two sexy Latina women walked past our bench.  They actually looked like a mother-daughter combination.
“Did you like those ladies?” Richard asked me.
“You didn’t think they were pretty?”
“Not my type.”
“Oh yeah? You prefer blondes maybe, like her over there?”  I pointed at a stunning blonde walking across the other side of the park.
“Aww man, you just like her cuz she’s got that tiny miniskirt on.”  Kinda true.  “Nah, all of these girls are too skinny for me.  If I fucked any of them, I’d break them in two.  I need a woman with a big butt.  I’m talkin’ huge!  The bigger the better!  Like that chick over there!” Indeed, judging by Richard’s female of choice, he certainly likes his women large and in charge.  And there sure as hell ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.

Just me and a homeless dude, sitting on a park bench in Hayes Valley, checking out the ladies.

I looked at my watch and noticed that it was getting late and I had some place to go, so I excused myself.  The whole time I had been speaking with Richard I had been anticipating that he would ask me for money, but he never did.  This was a good thing—I had no cash on me and I was kind of dreading that awkward moment.  Then again, he had his booze, his clothes, and a bag full of food (I didn’t mention that part before, but he had food, including a box of Triscuits.  During his incoherent babbling about Montana, he had mentioned how his grandmother won some Triscuit recipe contest 60 years ago). What more did he need?

“Richard, what do you do all day?”
“You know, the usual…try to take over the world.”
“How are you gonna do that?”
“Panhandling.”
“I’m also trying to take over the world.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a lawyer.”
Richard looked down at his wine, then back up at me.  “I think my way is better for taking over the world.”  He certainly had me there.

I checked my watch–we had been chatting for nearly an hour and a half.  I was meeting a friend for dinner, so at that point I said goodbye and started walking home.  I passed a man smoking a cigarette and asked him for one.  I was hoping he would give me one, so that I good be an obnoxious liberal and point out that people pretend not to see the homeless, but will do something nice for the handsome and gainfully employed.  However, the guy didn’t even look at me.  It was only when I got home and looked in the mirror that I realized that in my unshaven, hungover state, with my unkempt hair (this was before I got a haircut), baggy jeans and 10 year-old gray hoodie, I probably looked almost as homeless as Richard.

Epilogue: Two weeks later I went back to the park after eating lunch at Café Mercury.  Richard was there with a friend.  His face was bloody, with fresh stitches above his eyebrow.  I said hello, and he kind of recognized me, but not quite.
“Richard, what happened to you?”
“You know how it is–you win some, you lose some.”
“Do you need anything?”
“Nah man…I got my smokes, my food, my…” he opened his jacket to reveal a small bottle of cheap vodka.
“Sounds like a great Saturday afternoon.”
“I’ll say.  A great fuckin’ Saturday afternoon.”  I left Richard with his friend and walked back to my apartment, trying to pretend that the situation didn’t depress me.

I won’t try to sound like I have a lot of street cred by saying that Richard is my “friend.”  I don’t know much about him.  I would not introduce him to my single female friends as a prospective date.  I would probably not invite him over to my apartment for dinner. But he’s a human being and he has a story to tell—that’s enough for me to at least appreciate his company.

36. A Modest Proposal

Tags

Angels, economy, gun control, homelessness, Medicare, organic

I’d be lying if I said that I’ve been following this whole “sequestration” hullaballoo enough to write an intelligent, informed piece about it.  Admittedly, my only two sources of political news these days (really, since I started working) are the New York Times op-ed page and Jon Stewart, and I’ve been too busy at work the past couple of weeks to catch up even on those.  However, one doesn’t need to read the Wall Street Journal to know that the American economy is all kinds of screwed up.  Needless to say, desperate times call for desperate measures, and with Obummer in control for the Dems and Bonerhead representing the GOP, it’s not remotely surprising that our government has failed to produce even a hint at a rational solution to any portion of our economic woes.

Fear not government, J is here.  Following the immortal advice of one John F. Kennedy, romancer of countless women and one-time president of the United States of America, I am not asking what my country can do for me (mainly because I already know the answer to that: “sweet bupkiss”), but I am asking what I can do for my country. Actually, I’m not even asking what I can do to help, I’m just flat-out helping by letting the Internet/U.S./world know exactly what we need to do in America to get out of this mess in which we are currently wallowing (which mess, incidentally, I blame on Reagan).  One thing we all need to understand before I begin: you can’t please all the people all the time.  Period.  Being from San Francisco, my solution probably has a somewhat liberal slant.  Nonetheless, I assure you that I have tried to the best of my ability to come up with a solution that defies party lines and that would, if brought to Congress (as it damn well should be), gain substantial bipartisan support.

Okay, enough with the introduction.  Without further ado, I present to you J’S MODEST PROPOSAL FOR FIXING THE U.S. ECONOMY AND THE U.S. IN GENERAL:

I. Health Care

The one piece of legislation that has and will continue to define the Obama Administration is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare.”  Depending on your political leanings, one may view Obamacare as a G-dsend, a blessing, a blessing-in-disguise, a curse-disguised-as-a-blessing (a.k.a. a “curse in a blessing’s clothing”), or the devil.  The particular effects of Obamacare will not fully be understood until several years after all of its provisions have been enacted, but the debate around the law has made two things very clear: (1) healthcare in this country is really freaking expensive, but doesn’t necessarily need to be that way, and (2) Medicare is quickly becoming a huge burden on the federal budget that we simply can’t afford (see this chart below, from the non-partisan Center for American Progress).

I’m no health policy expert and I’m certainly not a doctor, but my mom is a medical anthropologist and my sister has an MPH, and I’ve spoken with both of them quite a bit on the subject of the American healthcare crisis.  Based on those ongoing conversations and a fair amount of independent research, I’ve arrived at two feasible and easily-implemented solutions that will at least begin to enable progress on the healthcare front.  Bear in mind that these are just the initial baby steps to making healthcare affordable for all Americans, but we all must acknowledge that Rome (and the hospitals therein) was not built in a day.

A. Tort Reform

Ask any doctor what his or her worst professional fear is, and he or she will immediately answer “getting sued for malpractice.”  This is far scarier than having a patient die on the operating table—in fact, the only reason that a patient’s death is remotely frightening to a doctor is that it could lead to a nasty lawsuit.  To help alleviate these fears, doctors, and the hospitals that employ them, double down on medical malpractice insurance.  Of course, this insurance is not cheap, and who ends up footing the bill?  Why, John Q. Patient, of course, in the form of inflated medical costs.

Doctors should not be living in constant fear of getting sued.  We should be down on our knees thanking anybody who went through the hell of medical school and is willing to accept a good-but-not-great paycheck (doctors make less than lawyers) in order to save our freakin’ lives.  The last people on earth we should be rewarding or even encouraging are medical malpractice lawyers.  Take it from me, a member of the bar: plaintiffs’ attorneys are the scum of the earth, and medical mal lawyers are the scum of plaintiffs’ attorneys, so that makes them the scum of the scum.  Remember John Edwards, one-time potential presidential candidate and infamous adulterer?  He was a medical malpractice lawyer.

My solution?  Get rid of medical malpractice suits, with no exceptions.  Believe me, I know lawyers, and if you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile, and then sue you for false advertising about the size of what you gave them.  Simply pass a federal statute that states that any claim of medical malpractice brought against a licensed doctor will be immediately dismissed, with harsh sanctions imposed upon the attorney who filed the case.  What about actual instances of doctors screwing up and harming patients?  Yes, patients will have one less avenue for compensation if this happens, but this is a small price to pay for lower medical bills across the board.  Also, once this legislation goes into effect, doctors will be under much less stress once the fear of being sued for malpractice is lifted from their shoulders, and will likely perform much better, resulting in fewer accidents in the first place.  In other words, everybody wins, except medical malpractice lawyers and insurance companies, but honestly, fuck them.  Can I get an amen?

B. Fixing a Broken Medicare System

I have a conservative friend (he’s a bit older) who blames Lyndon B. Johnson for everything that’s wrong in this country, from starting the Vietnam War to signing the Civil Rights Act (this friend is a proponent of the Clarence Thomas “helping black people actually hurts black people” school of thought).  However, my friend doesn’t seem to mind Medicare all that much (he’s a doctor, I should add). At least, he didn’t used to mind it.  It seems that, for a long time, Medicare was a fine program that people all across the country seemed to love, but now all of a sudden it’s coming under a lot of fire, as we realize that it costs a heckuva lot.

The Republicans want to raise the minimum age for receiving Medicare to 67.  I find this disgusting. We already work far too much in America, and bumping up the age at which one is eligible to receive Medicare is tantamount to saying, “sorry bub, we’re gonna need you to work an extra 2 years.” Having recently joined the work force in full swing, I’ll say right now that the day I turn 65, you’d better believe your dippy bippy that I’m retiring, and there’s no way in hell I’m going to take another two trips around the seasons without affordable insurance.

Pushing the age of eligibility up another 2 years is genuinely inhumane, and absolutely not necessary, when in reality there is a much simpler solution that will save American taxpayers a ton of money while keeping health costs down.  This fix is to put a cap on the age at which somebody can receive Medicare.  I think we can start with 90.  From 65 until 90, you can receive Medicare.  After that, if you want medical treatment, it’s on your own dime.  We can start the cap at 90, then over a few years, or maybe a decade, lower it to 85 and then to 80.  Still, that’s 15 years with solid government-subsidized medical insurance.

Why the cap?  Because let’s face it, after a certain age, people really don’t need to be alive.  Seriously—have you talked to an octogenarian lately?  They’re bitter, ornery, and constantly complaining about everything from their prostates to the mailman to the damn bakery that makes its French bread too crusty. They sure as hell aren’t contributing anything positive to society; they’re days of doing that are long gone. If an old man gets cancer, he’s going to die—and that’s fine.  Everybody dies.  I don’t think we taxpayers need to pay $200,000+ for some random grandpa in Minnesota to get chemo to extend his life an extra few months.  Let these people die with dignity, for Pete’s sake.

Saving money, being humane, and making America a better place.  Yes we can!

II. Les Miserables

The “Occupy” movement of 2011 and 2012 brought the concept of percentiles into the American (and global) consciousness, as more and more Americans started expressing discontent and even anger over the fact that the top 1% of Americans hold 35% of the wealth, while the bottom 80% hold barely over 10%.  According to recent figures (taken from the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on “poverty”; I was too lazy to read the rest), roughly 15% of the country lives in poverty.  Unemployment is still hovering just above 8%, but that figure (which is really already quite dismal) doesn’t tell the whole story, as in some states and counties unemployment is solidly in the double digits.  Those who are “gainfully” employed don’t necessarily have easier lives, as stagnant wages combined with skyrocketing costs of living have greatly broadened the “working poor” class.

In these dark economic times, it seems preposterous to cut federal spending aimed at helping the lower classes, but with record spending on welfare, foodstamps, and unemployment during the Obama administration with little to show for it, the social safety net is beginning to look quite porous.  I have a very simple suggestion that will create a beneficial ripple effect, bringing back prosperity into multiple spheres of American life.

A. Helping the Poor

Many conservatives, particularly those of the older, white, male variety, say that it’s not the government’s job to help the poor, and that the poor need to “pick themselves up by their bootstraps,” get jobs, and learn to become contributing members of society.  Conventional conservative wisdom dictates that the reason poor people don’t work is because welfare incentivizes laziness—why should I get a job and bust my ass when I can just not get a job and get paid almost as much?  The strain on the rest of the country (us hard-working types, that is) is then doubled—not only are we paying for these moochers, but they’re not putting in any taxes to bring down the deficit.

There was a time when I believed that Horatio Alger was a bunch of malarkey, and that people can’t be expected to help themselves.  That was before I went to India.  In India, the “social safety net” is more like a giant innertube, with a gaping hole through which anybody except for the fattest 30% of the population will slide.  Most Indians receive no aid from the government, so do they lay down and die?  Some do, but most just learn survival.  Do you know how much food a human being actually needs to survive?  It ends up that it’s much less than you’d expect, especially if you’re from America where even the poor are morbidly obese.  Do you know how often somebody in India buys new shoes?  The answer is never—he fixes the pair he has if they get too old.  How large of a living space do you need for a family of seven?  I guarantee that whatever you’re thinking is quite the overshot; the answer is roughly 160 square feet.

It’s high time for Americans to learn these valuable life lessons.  Thus, I think we should reduce spending on foodstamps from $110 billion per year to $0.  Unemployment compensation should be cut from $77 billion annually to $0.  We spend $57 billion every year on public housing.  You know what number would work better?  $0.  That’s right: a big, fat nuthin’ at every corner.  Will some folks die?  Well sure, maybe.  You can’t make an omelet if you don’t break any eggs, but as many Americans will learn, you can make a one-egg omelet that will feed a family of four. Mitt Romney was full of shit when he said the 47% of Americans who don’t pay taxes won’t help themselves.  They most certainly will, they just need a little kick in the ass.

Don’t believe me?  Ask any economist to list the centers of economic growth in the next 50 years, and he or she will undoubtedly mention the “BRIC” nations—Brazil, Russia, India and China, four countries where people aren’t relying on mother government and are instead learning to fend for themselves, with explosive results (that is, explosive economies, not literal explosions, for the most part).  The U.S. could easily join the BRIC nations as a breeding ground for unprecedented economic expansion (okay, so maybe it would have more precedent in the U.S., but you get the idea).  BRICU—that has a nice ring to it.  Or maybe UBRIC.

B. Helping the Homeless

There is one special class of the ultra-poor who are often forgotten: those who are so poor that they must sleep on the streets, beg for food, and shit on the sidewalk.  I’m talking about the homeless, pervasive in even the wealthiest cities (like our dear San Francisco).  Most people don’t want to think about the homeless.  Obama doesn’t.  Those jokers up on Capitol Hill certainly don’t.  It’s not that they hate the homeless, they’d just prefer to believe that nobody in America is that lacking in…well…everything.

I, on the other hand, think of the homeless every day, as I see them huddled in bunches outside of the liquor stores on my morning walk down Market Street.  Old ones, young ones, men and women of all races, sometimes without shoes, sometimes without pants, and always without hope.  These people are suffering, and nobody wants to do anything to remotely alleviate their pain.  I want to do something for them: I want to put them out of their misery.  Yes, by killing them.  It’s the only humane thing to do.  These people are living miserable lives, waiting for sweet, sweet death to overtake them.  I think the least we can do for a homeless man, as good Americans and good Christians (or Jews, as the case may be), is to put a bullet between his eyes.

I use the word “we” here in the most literal sense.  We do not have enough resources to pay the military or other government-sponsored officers/executioners to kill our homeless.  Our deficit is too large to be using our hard-earned tax dollars to fund large-scale urban euthanasia.  Besides, if we left it to the government, they’d probably screw it up, just like they screw up everything.  If a senator tried to kill a hobo, he’d probably end up adding ten years to the guy’s agonizing life.

This is why I propose forming a nationwide network of “Angels” to assist the homeless to heaven.  Angels would work on a strictly volunteer basis, and provide their own weapons.  Obviously they would have to go through rigorous background checks, and no person would be accepted as an Angel if he or she had been in prison within the past 12 months or in a mental institution within the past 6.  Also, Angels would be strictly forbidden from using assault rifles or guns with high capacity magazines to kill the homeless.  I warned you at the beginning of this piece that I’d take a liberal slant, and I am absolutely pro gun-control, especially when it comes to killing the homeless.  A real hunter doesn’t need an assault rifle to kill a deer, and he certainly doesn’t need anything close to a semi-automatic weapon to kill a wounded or sickly deer.  Homeless people are even slower than wounded or sickly deer.  If some Angel, drunk with power (and perhaps vodka) goes crazy and starts shooting at the homeless and homeful alike, I hope he’s carrying a pistol that holds no more than 10 bullets, for the sake of our children.

Angels would be highly respected in their communities, and would get to wear identifying patches, which would look something like this:

Angels (sometimes referred to as “Angels in America”) would take on many roles in daily American life.  They could work as safety guards, helping our kids cross the street.  They could work as the National Guard on a volunteer basis, cutting down on unnecessary defense spending.  They could officiate weddings and bar/bat mitzvahs.  I’m just throwing out some ideas here, people.

III. Other Issues Facing Our Nation

There is a veritable hodge-podge of other issues related to America’s economy that are in dire need of some resolution, and I can’t begin to address them all here.  I’m just going to present the two that immediately came to mind on my walk to work this morning, when I passed by a young man on the street holding a cardboard sign that said “From Bulgaria, no money. Thank you for you’re kindness.”

            A. Immigration Reform

Most people acknowledge that the large population of illegal aliens/undocumented immigrants in this country is some kind of problem.  Either they should get on the path to citizenship so that they can contribute to society (and maybe, G-d forbid, pay taxes), or they should kindly go back to whence they came.  Most proponents of “immigration control” focus on the latter, and if Republicans are in charge, the results will undoubtedly be racist.  Seriously, can Republicans do anything without it being racist?

Republican “immigration reform” works as follows: See a man who looks Mexican.  Ask him for proof that he’s American.  If he fails to produce proof, deport him.

So. Freaking. Racist.

Being a liberal Democrat, I detest racism in all forms.  But just because I hate racism does not mean that I love illegal immigrants coming to our country, speaking all sorts of languages I don’t understand, stealing jobs from Americans, committing crimes, and filling up our emergency rooms while not paying for health insurance.  Pu-leeze.  I’m an American first, Democrat second.  Here’s a simple, non-racist plan for dealing with our immigration problem. If an Angel sees somebody who looks foreign (and over 18), regardless of race or gender, that Angel can stop him or her and demand to see some kind of identification—for example, a driver’s license, a state ID card, or some DREAM Act card that demonstrates that the person is on a state-sponsored road to citizenship.  Bear in mind that there are foreigners of all races; perhaps it’s a white man who looks Russian, or a black woman who looks Nigerian, or a dark-skinned man who looks like he’s from India or one of the ‘Stans, or maybe southeast Asia.  Angles will not discriminate.

If the foreign-looking person cannot produce proper identification, the Angel will shoot him or her in the head.  Our court systems are clogged up the wazoo and lengthy deportation proceedings are a waste of everyone’s time and money.  Trust me on this; I’m a lawyer.

This may sounds a bit harsh, but I envision a one-year ramp-up period leading to this, which will give everybody in America who is over 18 (or who looks over 18) enough time to either (a) get proper ID or (b) leave the country.  One year—that’s a long time.  Anybody with half a brain should be able to get ID within a year.  And speaking of having half a brain…

B. Education

From what I understand, there was a time when the American education system was the envy of the world.  Our system had the best funding, we had the highest literacy rate, and we were the best at math.  Now, countries all over the world (especially those in Scandinavia and Asia) are kicking our asses in these departments.

Many people will blame our educational system for this.  They say that for our children need better schooling, and that means smaller class sizes, better teachers, and more access to high-quality learning institutions.  But achieving all of these crucial elements takes money, and if you have been paying attention at all to this blog post or the world in general, you’ll understand that money does not grow on American trees these days.

I’d propose a different approach: instead of trying to make our country smarter, we should focus on making it less stupid.  Of course, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this.  Many years ago, the concept of eugenics gained a bit of popularity among many circles in the U.S.  The theory was that stupid begets stupid, so if you prevent a stupid person from begetting, there will be several fewer younglings in the world bringing down the average intelligence of the nation.  There is a famous Supreme Court case from 1927 in which the court held that a law requiring the forced sterilization of the feeble-minded was constitutional.  In the case, a doctor had sterilized a dumb woman with a dumb mom and a dumb grandma (note that in 1927, promiscuity was equated with a lack of intelligence), and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes lauded the act, declaring that “three generations of imbeciles is enough.”

I know that my readership is smart, so I need not explain how fucked up that is.  More importantly, a mass sterilization effort would be very draining on our country’s human resources.  To sterilize a man, you need at least three people (two to hold him down and one to cut off his balls), and to sterilize a woman, you really need somebody who has been medically trained.  We can’t have all of our able-bodied folks and doctors wasting time sterilizing the stupid.  The easier, cheaper and more effective solution is, of course, execution.  This may seem like a pretty harsh or even drastic solution at first, and 10 or 20 years ago I would not have suggested it, but let’s face it, in today’s economy, there’s simply no room for the stupid.  After however many hundreds or thousands of years of coexisting with the lovable town oaf(s), times are tough and we’ve reached a point where stupid people are no longer capable of contributing to society.  Think about it—in the year 2013, you’ll never see a job description that says “stupid people preferred” or even “stupid people welcome.”  Those days are over.  Thus, to avoid stupid people further mooching off of our resources, we need to kill them.  I’m sure that if you explained this to a stupid person he’d understand…or at least he’d understand if he wasn’t so stupid.

Now comes the tricky part—how can we tell who is stupid?  Some people may suggest testing, but anybody who knows anything about education can tell you that standardized tests are unfair and don’t actually tell you how smart or dumb different people are.  Intelligence is more subjective than that, and usually only the smartest of the smart can accurately and efficiently deduce whether or not somebody has the mental agility to eventually contribute to society.  I propose forming a very selective army of our most intelligent Americans, who are willing to donate an hour of time here and there in between curing cancer and composing symphonies to hunt and kill the stupid.  This will be an extremely elite squadron, and each member should wear the only insignia worthy of his or her superlative position:

IV. And One More Thing… 

I admit, my solution for saving America leads to a lot of dead bodies: dead old folks, dead poor, dead homeless, dead foreigners, dead idiots, dead investment bankers (I didn’t include that part in this blog, but it doesn’t really require much explanation).  What should we do with all of these corpses?  Cemetery space is prime real estate that we can’t afford to just give away, and burning bodies creates fumes that are bad for the environment.  Here’s my suggestion: human bodies are rich in nutrients, right?  Why not donate the bodies to local farms (such as the Hayes Valley Farm) to use in fertilizer, in order to produce organic, locally-grown fruits and vegetables!  As you can see, my plan for saving America is the gift that keeps on giving.

V. Conclusion

The way I see it, there are only two ways of solving America’s problems: the Republicans’ way, which involves massive (and massively unfair) spending cuts while genuflecting to the rich, and my way, in which everybody gets what they deserve. I think we all know what needs to be done.  Contact your congressperson today today and tell him or her that you support J’s plan.

The future of America depends on it.

35. On the Recent Tech Wave in San Francisco

Tags

benevolent donkeys, Dead Kennedys, Galt's Gulch, poetry, San Francisco, techies

I warn you in advance that this week’s post is a bit of a manifesto. Like another manifesto that is receiving a lot of attentions these days, mine is bound to be far too long, angsty, angry, and at times incoherent, but with some good points thrown in here and there (for the record, I do not support vigilante justice or murder, but one cannot deny that there are more than just hints of veracity in Dorner’s overall position that the LAPD is a chronically corrupt organization that presents a heinous example of the abuse of governmental power).  In any event, consider yourself warned (and please don’t sue me for intentional infliction of emotional distress).  Enjoy!

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A couple of weeks ago I read this post and decided to write an improved version of it.  I sent my post to Jason Evanish, the author of the first post, and he liked my take on his creation enough that he linked my page to his.  Within one week of his doing so, San Francisco Love Affair received nearly 3000 hits (in the first year of the blog, it received roughly 5000).  That post received 7 likes and 16 comments (my previous bests were 2 and 3, respectively), and lead to my blog gaining 5 new followers (for a grand total of 12).

I don’t anticipate that I’ll ever reach that level of success again with SFLA, unless I find another opportunity to ride on the coattails of somebody else’s popularity.  However, given the off-chance that my popularity continues for another post, I thought I’d take the time to write about something very important to me. I am thus abandoning my original plan for this post, which was going to be a piece entitled “On My Favorite YouTube Videos.”  If you’re interested in that, I’ll cut to the chase—this is my all-time favorite clip ever posted to YouTube.

My G-d I love that clip.  It works on so many levels.  Alas, masturbatory mimicry is not the subject of today’s post, although I’ll use it as a segue.  When I meet somebody new in San Francisco, and he tells me he works for a startup, I’m sometimes inclined to smile and say “that’s so interesting” while making a jerking-off gesture.  I usually restrain from doing that, because I don’t like to be overtly rude except when it’s absolutely necessary, but occasionally, unbridled rudeness is unavoidable, particularly if I’ve been drinking.

Take the other night, for example.  I was out to dinner with my friend, her boyfriend, and their friends (another couple).  Being a fifth wheel didn’t bother me, as I had already had a few drinks and was just killing time until I met up with another friend.  Somebody at the table (I can’t remember who) started complaining about the rents in SF, so I pulled out my soapbox (which I keep in my backpack at all times) and started ranting about how it’s because of the tech kids who have taken over SF and are ruining it more and more every day.  Naturally, both my friend’s bf and the other dude at the table were techies, so the attacks inadvertently got kind of personal.  I believe I pointed my finger at them and said “you people”—in a joking way, of course, but I don’t think it was “ha ha” funny.

After much thought and a $20,000 payment to a branding firm, I’ve come up with a name for what has been bothering so much.  I call it “The Problem”.  And what, you may ask, is The Problem?  Allow me to explain.  Sometime in the past few years, Silicon Valley finally moved past silicon and software and applications took over.  The good news: fewer people are getting cancer from inhaling dust in microchip factories.  The bad news: any smart kid who is good at computers can get a high-paying job.  This wouldn’t be so bad, except these smart kids who are good at computers find the peninsula to be boring, so they’d rather move to San Francisco.  They get paid a lot, and cause rents and the cost of living to escalate to biblical proportions (fact: the price of Jesus’ Nazareth apartment was what turns out to be $2300 for a tiny studio when translated to today’s prices.  Fortunately for him, he was Jesus).  They drink PBR and act like people in Williamsburg acted 10 years ago, except with less drugs and little, if any, appreciation of irony.  They use apps.  They talk about apps (again, with little, if any, appreciation of irony).  They take pictures of their food. They wear SF Giants caps even though the only sports that they enjoy are Skeeball and Berlin-style ping-pong.  They multiply, and next thing you know, everybody in San Francisco either works for a startup or works for Google, but in the end, they work in tech and subscribe to the tech lifestyle.

Why do I call this “The Problem”, with both the “T” and the “P” in caps?  There’s one immediate obvious answer: I am bothered that I no longer identify with the demographic that defines the “quintessential San Franciscan.”  I use my phone to talk to people (as in, with my voice, not in the form of text messages), and when I want a restaurant recommendation, I ask a human being.  When I go running, I just put on shoes and hop out my door—I don’t track where I’m going and post my progress on Facebook for the world to see.  I don’t read TechCrunch or Reddit or Mashable or [insert names of other blogs or websites or whatever that SF Tech people constantly read] every day.  Or ever.  In fact, the only blog that I read regularly is my own (it never gets old).  I admit that I get paid on par with what these kids make, but my company has been in the city since 1883, so you can’t tell me that I’m changing the nature of this town.  Besides, as an IP lawyer, I work in the world’s second-oldest profession (because it wasn’t long before prostitutes starting suing each other for patent infringement).

SF tech people see the world in a completely different way from me, and I find it very difficult to relate to them.  In Evanish’s blog post, he included the line, “Pro Tip: Try a couple new apps every week and if you’re looking to spark conversation, ask someone if they’ve tried any great apps lately.”  He said that without any sarcasm or irony; he was dead serious.  Honestly, if somebody actually said that to me in real life, it wouldn’t spark conversation, it would spark me punching him in the face.  Then again, given my inability to communicate with the myriad cute girls working in tech here, maybe “tried any great apps lately?” would be a good pick-up line.  It would probably work better than my current go-to (“Was your daddy a benevolent donkey salesman?  Because you’ve got a nice ass”).

But in all seriousness, the fact that the author of this blog can’t make out with the authors of this blog is not reason enough to deem a city-wide phenomenon “The Problem”; there has to be something more.  And there is more, you can bet your sweet bippy there is.  The problem with the tech wave in San Francisco is that it is chipping away at the spirit of the city. People used to talk about how San Francisco was an incredibly diverse city (minus our glaring lack of black people), but now “diversity” in San Francisco means having dinner with a white product manager, an Indian developer and a female Asian UX designer.

For those of you who don’t live in San Francisco, a “UX designer” is somebody who designs a website or app’s “user experience” (get it?).  From what I understand, the UX world is kind of like architecture: predominately female, but many of the top dogs are gay men.

The Problem goes beyond gentrification—the population of San Francisco is not only becoming wealthier, it’s becoming homogenous. As Evanish notes, “working in tech is the norm, not the exception.”  This is because, as rents soar up to Uranus (the oft-neglected planet, possibly because its name sounds inappropriate no matter how you pronounce it), the only jobs available in the area that pay a livable salary are in the tech industry.  The other day I was having dinner with a friend who works for a tech company, and while bitching about The Problem (as I’m wont to do), she noted that people just have to get used to the fact that San Francisco is a magnet for extremely bright, talented people, and if you can’t hang with that, you’ll have trouble living here.  I asked her, “when did you become a Republican?”  This is not something to be taken lightly.  “Republican” is probably the harshest insult you could ever bestow upon a San Franciscan.  My friend would have probably been less offended if I had called her a “[expletive]-guzzling [explitive][explitive]face.” Friend, if you’re reading this now, I apologize.

I don’t think that the “we’re here because we earned it” mentality is rare in the new San Francisco.  Don’t get me wrong, these tech kids are smart, and good at computers.  I can respect that; I never would have passed my intro-level Java class in college if my CS-major buddy hadn’t done all of my homework assignments for me.  But there is a kind of Ayn Randian “only the best survive” attitude about this tech wave that bothers me (see this article on the pitfalls of the virtuous meritocracy for more on this point).  First of all, all of the brilliant intellectuals who happen to not be interested in technology (and who can articulate the general sentiment of this blog post much better than I) are getting priced out.  Second, other important people in a city’s make-up who are not in high-paying positions, such as police officers, teachers, waiters, secretaries, convenience store workers, laundrymat owners, tailors and cobblers, are going to have to commute from far away.   Third, San Francisco’s unfortunate but very prevalent poor community is going to be swept under the rug,  away in the wind, or at least to the outer reaches of the East Bay.  I know I’ve written about this before, but it sickens me how many of my fellow San Franciscans don’t want to solve the city’s homeless problem and would rather just see it “go away.”  When Mitt Romney claimed he didn’t care about the “very poor,” much of San Francisco got its collective panties in a bunch, but the truth is that most San Franciscans I’ve spoken to on the subject feel the same way but articulate their beliefs in a slightly more P.C. manner (if calling all homeless people “dirty crackheads” can be considered P.C.).

In short, San Francisco is becoming a city that is primarily composed of young, rich, computer-minded people.  Not everybody sees this as a problem.  Mayor Ed Lee loves the thought of his city being full of wealthy tech people and devoid of the poor(er).  As more and more of the riff-raff is displaced, the city’s crime rates will go down and tax revenues will go up.  If people are forced to leave the city, that just means that they won’t be able to vote against the incumbent mayor, and elections aren’t until 2015 so Lee has plenty of time to clean the town up.  After all, “[San Francisco] did not become the greatest city that ever was or ever will be by letting [non-rich] savages through its gates.”

Not everybody sees what is happening to San Francisco as a problem.  After all, technology is certainly the driving force of the twenty-first century, and who wouldn’t want to live in the center of the action?  Me, I suppose.  That’s why I left New York in 2004.

But what is to be done?  The tech revolution is here to stay, right?  And we certainly can’t lower rents in this town!  This may be true; we have lost that battle.  But the war for San Francisco’s soul is far from over (at least until Mayor Lee gets re-elected).  For those of us who still want to fight the good fight, I’ve developed a small list of things we can do to keep the spirit of San Francisco alive, while living in harmony with the tech-folk.  Here it is, the FIVE THINGS WE CAN ALL DO TO KEEP SAN FRANCISCO FROM TOTALLY BEING WASHED TO SEA BY THE UNDERTOW OF THE TECH WAVE:

1. Look up from your technological devices and witness the beautiful city.  Last month, for a while there was a website dedicated to showing artsy black and white photos of people walking down the street glued to their iPhones, iPads, and other gadgets.   For whatever reason, that site has been taken down, but if you really want to see people walking down the streets ensconced in their personal little worlds, you need look no further than any street in San Francisco…or on the BART or Muni, or in any café or restaurant or even bar.  I’m not joking, you go to a bar and everybody is on their phones.  What has these people so absorbed, so zombified? Grindr, or maybe some heterosexual equivalent?  Are they asking yelp! what they should order?  Playing Angry Birds: Where in the World is Carmen San Diego edition?  Maybe, but I think most people are just texting, or checking their email for the millionth time, just because it’s become a nervous habit, as if our brains can’t handle ten seconds without technological stimulation.  Electronics have destroyed our attention spans, and they’ve also made us incredibly selfish.  Why deal with other people in the world when you can live in a world of your own?  Plug in your headphones and drown the flotsam and jetsam out.

I won’t say that I’m completely innocent.  I remember when I got my first iPod, my senior year of college.  This was back when iTunes didn’t exist and you had to use MusicMatch to load music onto your iPod, which was white and clunky and weighed as much as a calculus book.  Yeah, I’m that old.  I went to Columbia, and a large chunk of my life was spent on the subway, especially senior year, when I no longer gave a hoot about my studies.  My first three years in NY, I used to get great pleasure out of riding the subway late at night and striking up conversation with the drunk, high, and crazy folks who found themselves headed uptown in the witching hour.  I once met a guy who was convinced that he was the reincarnation of John Lennon, even though he was born ten years before Lennon was killed.  Anyhow, I remember the first night I rode the train home late with my iPod.  A crazy homeless woman got on the train at Times Square, plopped down right next to me (we were the only two people in the train car), and started jabbering away.  I plugged in my iPod and put on some Beatles (speaking of John Lennon).  She kept talking to me, and I just stared blankly at the seat across from me and cracked a hint of a smile.  I had tuned her out, and was perfectly content in my own little world without her.

10 years later, I hate that shit.  San Francisco is full of amazing people doing amazing things, and you miss what makes the city the best place in the world if you’re glued to your iPhone.  Hell, just yesterday I saw some woman walk right past this stupendous creation on my street without noticing it.

This is happening in every glorious corner of the city, and it really shouldn’t.  So here’s my plea: every once and a while, put your phone away.  Take your headphones out.  Listen to the sounds of San Francisco.  Talk to strangers.  See something beautiful and don’t take a picture.  It’s okay—I give you permission.

2. Kick it Old School.  One thing that has always bothered me about Japan is that nobody has any desire to own anything that is more than a year old.  People in Japan get new cars every year (which is nice if you want to buy a used car—I got a great 5-year old car for $1000 when I was there), and new cameras, and rice cookers too.  Whenever a new restaurant opens, people line up around the block for 3 months, and then immediately forget about it.  Pop stars come and go every fortnight.

This obsession with the new seems to permeate tech culture in America as well.  That makes sense—for those in the industry, survival depends on innovation, and what made millions last week is a piece of shit on the discount rack today.  People who waited in line for the iPhone 4S waited in line again for the iPhone 5, what, six months later?  G-d forbid you own any “ancient” technology that has been on the market for over a year.  Every time I walk down Valencia I feel like there are a dozen new bars and restaurants that are packed, but none of them seem all that great.  And of course, new apps come out every minute.

Don’t get me wrong, all of this new stuff is fun, I’m sure.  But San Francisco is an old city—it’s been around since the mid-1800s—and there are some legendary places worth checking out, which we have to support lest they go the way of the dodo.

So—instead of buying a book for your kindle, go to City Lights and buy a real book, with pages!
Go to the Tadich Grill—it’s been around since 1849!  Or the House of Shields, a relative youngster appearing on the scene in 1908.
Go see some shows at the Fillmore, Warfield and Great American Music Hall.
Go see some boobies at the Condor Club—apparently it’s the oldest strip club in town.
Don’t ride the trolleys though.  That shit’s for tourists.

There’s also something to be said about doing things the old fashioned way.  One of the worst dates I went on in 2012 was with a woman who was the UX designer for some app (I don’t remember what it’s called) that allows a user to hire a person to do pretty much anything (non-sexual) for $25 an hour, including buying groceries, babysitting, and carrying furniture up the stairs (as long as it’s not heavy–they don’t have insurance coverage for any back injuries). Anyhow, the woman told me that most people use it for house cleaning.  This means that, if you want your house cleaned, it may get done by somebody who doesn’t know diddly about cleaning houses and is more suited for less skilled labor (like walking your cat).  I’ve heard that sometimes they send engineers if no one else is available.  The best part: it costs more than a normal housecleaner.

Thus, you pay more and get less.  Further, you may get somebody different every time.  Trust me, it’s really best to get and stick with one housecleaner.  You form a relationship with her, she knows your house and understands your needs.  However, true housecleaners are becoming a dying breed due to this and other similar apps.  It ends up that people have become so afraid of human-to-human interaction that they’d rather press a few buttons to hire a housecleaner than actually get on the phone and call one.  I say that’s bullshit.  If anybody in SF needs an amazing housecleaner in SF, I’ll gladly recommend mine, just shoot me an email at sfloveaffair@gmail.com.  For real.

3. Stay Subversive, San Francisco.  On October 7, 1955, Allen Ginsberg performed his poem “Howl” for the first time ever at the Six Gallery on Fillmore Street.  Jack Kerouac was there, as was Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, and Neal Cassady.  And my grandma.  This reading is considered to be the coming-out party of the Beat Generation and established San Francisco as the best place in the world to be an intellectual, brooding, misunderstood and possibly alcoholic poet.

Around the time of reading at the Six Gallery, there was a proposal to build a freeway by the panhandle of Golden Gate Park.  Property values in the nearby Haight-Ashbury district plummeted with news of the coming mass of concrete and obnoxiously loud horseless carriages (‘20s, ‘50s…it’s all the same to me), and young, poor, bohemian, drug-using types who couldn’t afford to live elsewhere in the city moved into the neighborhood.  The freeway was ultimately defeated, but not before Haight-Ashbury became synonymous with the hippie counter-culture.  People flocked to San Francisco from all over America and the world to see Haight-Ashbury.  Some came for the music.  Some came to experience the freedom.  Some came to simply turn on, tune in and drop out.

After the “Summer of Love” in 1967, many middle-class folks living in the nearby neighborhood of the Castro fled to the suburbs to escape from the crazy hippies.  Housing prices in the area dropped, and young, poor homosexuals, many of whom had been attracted to San Francisco because of its open attitude, found a new sanctuary.  Just as the hippie movement was dying, gay culture was taking off.  A young Harvey Milk opened a camera shop in 1973 and, well, you saw the movie, so you know what happened.

Several years later, on the other side of town, the Ramones came from Queens and did a gig in the back room of the Savoy Tivoli in North Beach (back when North Beach was North Beach), officially introducing San Francisco to punk rock.  Numerous seminal punk acts emerged, including the Nuns, Mutants, the Offs, and of course, the Dead Kennedys.  The SF punks found the New York scene to be too snooty and aloof, and embraced the more politically-charged punk flavor of the Clash.

Flash forward to 2013.  The poets of San Francisco have largely been relegated to sporadic readings in Tenderloin basements with flickering fluorescent lights. The flowers of Haight-Ashbury have faded, and the word “hippie” has a negative connotation for most people (“cut your hair,” “take a shower,” etc.).  Gay culture is no longer subversive, for better of for worse (probably for better).  Punk is dead—just ask Crass.  And our city’s newest demographic, the techies, seem to be sorely lacking rebellious spirit.  Dressing up like Santa and getting piss-ass drunk on PBR doesn’t count as being edgy, especially if everybody else is doing it.  The game goes for dropping molly at an EDM show.  G-d that music is crap. As a good friend of mine recently quipped, “when I listen to dubstep, I understand how my grandparents must have felt when they first heard rock n’ roll.”

The problem (at least in my biased, skewed, warped opinion) is that techies are often brainy without being intellectual.  They’re former engineering students who never read Marx or Ginsberg or Camus or Sylvia Plath, never listened to the Beatles or Patti Smith or the Talking Heads or Peter Tosh, never watched old Hitchcock or Bogart or Goddard flicks, and have no idea why a street connecting Polk and Van Ness would be called “Alice B. Toklas Place” (FYI: Alice B. Toklas was an S.F. native who became the lover of Gertrude Stein.  She also invented pot brownies).

I often make fun of Stanford.  Stanford is vey proud of having produced so many of the brilliant techy minds that have made San Francisco what it was, but I find Stanford to be sickeningly wholesome.  I have a friend who went to Stanford, and for New Year’s Eve last year (as in 2012-2013), a friend of hers from Stanford who was 26 and rich from techy stuff rented a huge mansion in the Hollywood Hills to have a New Year’s party, to which he invited a whole lotta Stanford folks.  There were 2 open bars and a professional photographer, and the invitation said “dress to impress.”  When my friend told me about this party the week before it happened, I poked fun at her, joking that it would be the only New Year’s party in the Hollywood Hills where nobody did coke and nobody got laid.  On January 1^st, she sent me a gchat message confirming that I was correct.

This lack of texture and flavor is the new SF.  They even outlawed public nudity!  Harvey Milk is rolling in this grave.

I’m ranting (read: bitching) here but I’m not proposing any solutions, as I promised to do above, so let me cut to the chase: I’m not saying that San Franciscans need to do more drugs or be more promiscuous (although honestly, I wouldn’t be opposed to SF restoring its reputation as “that kind of place”).  I am saying that all San Franciscans, and human beings in general, should read a little less TechCrunch and a little more poetry.  That’s all.

4. Make Socially-Conscious Apps.  In December, I read this article, which talks about how the SF/Silicon Valley tech industry needs to stop making apps that only benefit members of the SF/Silicon Valley tech industry (or as I call it, “circle jerking”) and start using their programming skills to create programs that benefit society.  This piece really struck a chord with me—we have all of these brilliant minds, surely some of them are after something more than just becoming millionaires, right?

Shortly after reading the article, I had the good fortune of being connected with Code for America, an organization in SF that sets out to do exactly what the author of the article was discussing. Every year, CFA gives fellowships to small teams of young, brilliant programmers to go to cities with substantial lower-income populations (e.g., Detroit, New Orleans, Philly, etc.) and work with City Hall to come up with programs that can help improve city conditions and the quality of life for those urban residents who are too-oft forgotten.  Many of the resulting programs have to do with collecting data pertaining to lower-income households, or giving the poor equal opportunity to be heard on civic matters.

I had a conversation with a friend the other day regarding one of the Code for America programs called Textizen.  The basic concept behind the program is that a city planner can put surveys up all over a neighborhood (e.g., “Should we build a new subway stop here?”), and anybody with a cell phone can text in yes or no.  My friend scoffed at the idea.  “Come on,” he said, “these people need to enter the 21^st century.  Nobody texts anymore.  With a smartphone, you can just ‘push’ the answers.  It’s much more efficient.”

“That’s true,” I replied.  “But Textizen is designed so that everybody can use it…even people who can’t afford smartphones.”  Sometimes we forget that there are people who can’t afford smartphones.  That’s part of The Problem.

As I was writing the first paragraph of this section, I decided to re-read the article, and to send the author a note about Code for America.  It ends up that the author actually works at Code for America.  She was just doing some creative self-promotion.  Ain’t nuttin’ wrong with that, I suppose.

The point is: if you’re good with computers, join Code for America or some similar cause.  Please.

5. Let your Supervisor know that you don’t want San Francisco to become “Galt’s Gulch”.  “Galt’s Gulch” is the place where the few who are great enough to survive establish their new ultra-elite utopia at the end of Atlas Shrugged.  But you already knew that.

The time to fight is now, as is always the case.  Your weapon?  An email to your local Supervisor.  In SF we have 12 District Supervisors, and they run this town.  Literally.  You can find and email your Supervisor here.  What are you waiting for?  Write that email!

Oh, wait.  I should probably tell you the cause first.  For those of you not so into local politics, the most controversial bill before the Board of Supervisors today is one that, if passed, will allow owners of tenancies-in-common (TICs) to convert their units into condominiums by paying a $20,000 fee, instead of entering into the lottery.  This means a TIC owner can convert to a condo today, instead of waiting 10-20 years.  Why does this make a difference?  TICs are covered by rent control, and condos aren’t.

So if the bill passes…yeah.  Those of us who want an SF where non-techies can afford to live will lose, period.  The Board of Supervisors was supposed to vote on the bill last week, but tabled the vote until February 25^th.  Apparently Mayor Ed Lee, who would have the tiebreaker vote if the bill went 6 and 6, would be in a tough spot if he had to make the decision, torn between his tenants’ rights past and his “new dream” future.

My Supervisor, London Breed, represents District 5, which includes Hayes Valley, the Haight, the Panhandle, the Western Addition, Inner Sunset and Japantown—all tenant-heavy neighborhoods.  She grew up in public housing in the Western Addition (back when the Western Addition was the Western Addition, and one of the shittiest neighborhoods in the city) and now lives in the Lower Haight.  One would think that she would definitely not support the bill, given her background and constituency, but who knows?  She just got elected and is here to stay for at least four years.  If rents go up, a lot of not rich people can be removed from District 5 in four years, and they won’t be able to vote against Breed from Richmond (that’s Richmond, not the Richmond) or Fremont or wherever the hell they end up.

With that in mind, I’m sending Ms. Breed an email.  I haven’t quite finished it yet, but here’s what I have so far:

Dear Ms. Breed,

I urge you to vote against the TIC condo-conversion bill later this month.  I think the choice is obvious, for the following reason:

Need I say more?

Sincerely,
J

p.s. Was your daddy a benevolent donkey salesman?

*            *            *

Yesterday I had a friend visiting from out of town, and he wanted to “do what San Franciscans do,” so naturally, I took him to Dolores Park.

On the sidewalk by the park I saw this man:

I loved the idea so much that I paid him all of the money in my wallet ($9.25) to pen a poem about the new SF tech wave.  The resulting poem sums up in 13 lines more than I could say in nearly 10 pages.  That’s why I love poems.  They can do that.

Technology

by Lynn Gentry

The masons footprint left
The whisper in the shadows
As commerce won over the Barbary
The debt left to Haight’s daughters
as the prices drop
The dream is sold
This city is just a name
Now the gold standard is a word
Even the weed is tamed
As gazing in to a monitor
I see myself on maps
And only Google knows the answers
But their wires are tapped

*            *            *

Alright friends, I think I’ve bitched enough.  I don’t know if I’m fighting a losing battle, alienating my readership, or preaching to the choir (which, in this case, is tantamount to preaching to the perverted).  All I know is I had to get all of that off my chest.  If you made it this far, I cannot thank you enough.  Here is your reward:

34. On [Other] Things You Should Know About San Francisco

Tags

49ers, hella, penny farthing, San Francisco, snobbery, tips

A few days ago, a friend of mine sent me this article, the title of which, for those of you to lazy to click on the link, is “25 Things I Wish I Knew Before Moving to San Francisco.”  With all due respect to the author, who seems like a stand-up guy, I feel like this article was missing a certain…je nes sais quoi, so I took it upon myself to write a new version.  Since I’ve been here a while and consider myself to be a Bay Area native, I won’t list “things I wish I knew before I moved,” but instead, without further ado, here are 25 [OTHER] THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT SAN FRANCISCO BEFORE YOU MOVE HERE:

1. It’s cold.  The author of the other article started with this one, and with good reason.  I once had friends visit from NY, and the first thing they said to me was, “this is California, it’s supposed to be warm!”  No, that’s southern California.  Were you also looking for movie stars?  Because you won’t find them here (except for Danny Glover, and Robin Williams sometimes).  If you want the sun, move to LA.  If you want an enjoyable life experience, move here.  The choice is yours.

Pro tip: If you really want warmer weather, you can get it by leaving SF and traveling 2 or 3 miles in any direction (well, west is the ocean and you may have to go 5 miles to the south, but you get the point).

2. It’s expensive.  Of course, if you’re going to move here, you already figured this out when you hopped onto Craigslist to find an apartment.  Do yourself a favor—hop into your time machine, go back to March 2011 (or earlier), and find a cheap apartment with good rent control.  While you’re at it, please assassinate Twitter.  That’ll help keep rents down.

Pro tip: You can save money on food by not eating.

3. There do exist San Franciscans who are not tech people.  If you’re moving here now, you’re probably doing it because you got a job in the tech industry, but please understand that there are many other people who have lived here for a long time (over 2 years) who never read Techcrunch and don’t give a hoot about apps.  They are more knowledgable about the city than you (having been here for a longer time) and we’re also capable of appreciating some things with which technies generally struggle, like the joy of choosing a restaurant without the aid of yelp.  Oh shit, did I just switch pronouns?  The point is, the glorious city of San Francisco existed for a long time before tech people came here, and although we welcome them with open arms (and by “we,” I mean “greedy landlords,” who love the fact that not one of y’all could negotiate your way out of a paper bag), there’s so much more to the city than it being “tech central” or whatever the kids are calling it these days.

Pro tip: Make the most out of the time you spend with the teachers, police officers, waiters (that’s a unisex term now, right?), bartenders, artists, nurses, small business owners, and other people you meet in the city who are not lawyers, techies, or working in finance.  They won’t be able to afford to live here much longer.

4. The Chinese food in Chinatown is shit.  If you want darn good Chinese food, go to the Inner Richmond.  You can also get amazing Thai and Vietnamese there (and yes, there’s also a Burma Superstar, if you succumb to that kind of trendy).

Pro tip: For dim sum, I say hit up Tong Palace on Clement and 11^th.  If you go on a weekday it’s insanely cheap.

5. Many people here are socially liberal, fiscally conservative.  This is mainly due to the fact that many people here make a lot of money.  If you’re looking for fiscal liberals, go to Berkeley with all of the other commies.  If you’re looking for social conservatives, then get the fuck out of my town.

Pro tip: NPR is a thing of the past, now it’s all about podcasts for political opinion.  Unfortunately, I still haven’t figured out how podcasts work, so I can’t tell you which ones are good.

6. The Richmond District is historically gay.  Before the gays flooded to the Castro (in the time of Harvey Milk) and then to Folsom street (for those who like things a little more “interesting”), they generally lived side-by-side with Chinese immigrants in the Richmond.  I know this because a gay friend of mine told me (I’m unable to find any proof on Google, but I think it’s true).  Why is this important to know?  Because when you take a girl on a date to the Richmond for some Thai food and Toy Boat, you can drop this little tidbit of knowledge and totally impress her.

Pro tip: Many gays from the older generation still live in the Richmond, so if you play your cards right, you can probably see some wrinkly old man balls in the area, if you’re into that sort of thing.

7. The tap water here is safe and delicious.  I recently went to Costco with a friend and bought her a jumbo pack of Brita filters.  It was $40!  SUCH A WASTE OF MONEY!  In San Francisco you simply do not need to filter your water!  Really!  LA is a different story; the tap water there is disgusting. But they do have that great California weather!

Pro tip: You’ll also save money by asking for tap water in restaurants, as opposed to bottled water.  You shouldn’t be drinking bottled water anyway—ask me why if you’re interested in knowing more.

8. Living in Oakland is a totally viable option.  If you want to move here but the rent is scaring you away, head east, young man!  Oakland is basically the Brooklyn of San Francisco—slightly cheaper, rapidly gentrifying, and hipper…at least according to its residents.  If I ever leave my rent-controlled apartment, I’ll probably move there.

Pro tip: BART is great and all, but there’s something called the “casual carpool,” wherein you let random strangers drive you across the Bay Bridge from Oakland to SF, and it saves you both money (as the fare is lower if you have multiple people in your car). I’d think it’s a great way to meet people, but apparently there’s sort of an unspoken “no talking” rule. Is “unspoken ‘no talking’ rule” redundant?

9. You never need to take public transportation in the city, because you can ride your bike everywhere.  I know what your thinking—“but aren’t there all of those insane hills?”  Yes, but trust me, after one month, you’ll have calves of steel.  Also, you’ve probably seen this chart that shows which bikes are seen in which neighborhoods, and it’s true that, among the young folks, there is some bizarre snobbery involved in what kind of bike you ride.  But honestly, fuck that shit.  I ride a relatively old Cannondale mountain bike with city tires and Rock Shox and it gets the job done. That’s all that matters: getting the job done.

Pro tip: The hipsters still haven’t caught on that you can be the ultimate manifestation of old-school irony by riding a penny farthing.  If you start that trend, you’ll be the coolest guy in town.

10. San Francisco is a tiny city, and you will bump into everybody you know here all the time. Including that girl with whom you went on that incredibly awkward and uncomfortable okCupid date.

Pro tip: There’s no shame in ducking into an alley to avoid a face-to-face interaction.

11. Going to the Ferry Building will make you happy.  It always does, due to the multitude of amazing food options.  If you want the full experience, grab a loaf of Acme bread, some Cowgirl Creamery cheese, and some tasty salted pig parts from Boccalone (note: not kosher), and you’ve got yourself some good eatin’

Yes, that’s salami in a cone.

Pro tip: The Ferry Building is appropriately located right next to the ferry terminal, where you can catch a ferry boat that will take you to Marin.  And while you’re there…

12. There’s more to Marin than Sausalito and Muir Woods. I grew up in Marin, and it kind of bothers me when people talk about how the only places in Marin are Sausalito, which is one giant sea-side tourist trap (except for the No Name Bar, which is awesome), and Muir Woods, which is a slightly smaller, more outdoorsy tourist trap.  Once you move past the rich white people, Marin County has so much more to offer.

Pro tip: I suppose I should tell you what else Marin has to offer, since I haven’t actually written that blog post about it yet that I planned on writing last year.  If you’re the outdoorsy type, check out the watershed on the north side of Mt. Tam.  There are four lakes (or maybe five?) and any number of excellent hikes. In fact, this one looks pretty damn awesome, although it’s kinda long.  If you want something scenic but with a cute town feel, I recommend going to Blackie’s Pasture and walking down the bike path to downtown Tiburon, where you can order some fresh seafood at Sam’s or some killer gourmet Mexican at Guaymas.

*            *            *

We’re not even halfway there.  Damn, 25 is a lot! I’m so used to top 10 lists!  Fortunately, there’s hella more to know about San Francisco…

*            *            *

13. It helps if you know Spanish.  San Francisco was once part of the Spanish empire, and the legacy sort of lives on today, with many of our residents speaking Spanish.  Like California in general, there is a fairly large Mexican population (and smaller Central and South American populations), and although most of our resident Latinos/as speak English, it helps to understand Spanish if you want to know what they’re saying about you behind your back (as if you’re that special that they’re actually talking about you).  Sadly, I don’t speak Spanish.  I speak some Japanese, but that only comes in handy when I’m flirting with the waitress in a sushi restaurant (unless she’s actually Chinese…or Mexican).

Pro tip: If a woman begins a sentence with “Mira!,” that means you probably did or said something wrong.

14. 49er fans are legit…  I grew up in the Bay Area in the ‘80s, when the Niners were simply a way of life.  The team’s performance on Sunday affected the mood of the entire Bay Area the next week (bear in mind that the Raiders were in LA at this time, so even East Bay folks were Niner fans).  If the Niners won, everybody was smiling from Monday until the next game.  If they lost, the skies would be gray until we redeemed ourselves.  If you wanted to befriend a San Franciscan, all you had to do was mention the word “Niners.”  I think this all still holds true—when I was in Japan teaching English, one of the Japanese teachers with whom I worked said he loved Joe Montana, and we instantly became friends.  Dana Carvey (a Bay Area native) has a great bit about the phenomenon:

As far as I know, Niners fans are faithful.  I don’t know for sure, because I left the Bay Area in 1999, just when the Niners started to suck, and came back in 2011, just in time for them to start kicking ass again.  I’m assuming that the seats at the ‘Stick remained packed all of those years, and the city still tuned in, gray skies be damned.  That’s what I believe.  Please don’t tell me otherwise.

Pro tip: Ladies, if you want to get a San Franciscan man, just mention that you think that Jerry Rice is the greatest player to ever have graced the gridiron.  Note: this will only work if the man you want to get is straight.  Actually, I’m not even sure about that.

15. …Giants fans, not so much.  Let’s not lie to ourselves.  Before 2010, there were very few Giants fans.  Sure, there were Barry Bonds fans, but very few of them could actually name another player on the team.  Suddenly, the Giants won the world series and soon the whole town was bathed in Orange.  Frankly I don’t care, I love seeing people excited about the “team of the tweens,” whether or not it’s solely due to the bandwagon effect.  But don’t be fooled—if the Giants start losing, there will be no more sell-outs at AT&T Park.  That’s not horrible—as of now, the only people who can afford to go to Giants games are those who work in fancy law firms or for wealthy tech companies, who sit in their luxury boxes and eat gourmet sausage and drink Chardonnay while looking up from their iPads only if there’s a homerun or maybe if Buster Posey is up.

Pro tip: At trivia night, when they ask a question about a former Giants closer, the answer is almost always “Rod Beck.”  If they ask a question about an old-timey player from the New York Giants days, the answer is almost always “Mel Ott.”

16. There are a lot of poor and homeless people in San Francisco, and they are human beings too.  I’m going to get a little political here…and preachy and annoying and self-righteous.  Oh well.  Most of the young people in San Francisco are liberal Democrats, and love talking about helping the less fortunate.  However, many of these young liberals also talk about how homeless people in San Francisco are a problem that they’d like to see disappear.  It’s as if we’d like to live in a bubble where not only are we more “accepting” than the rest of America, but we don’t have to see any of the downsides of the urban environment.  I don’t want to make a blanket statement, because I know there are a lot of altruistic folks in SF too, but I have heard enough statements from friends, acquaintances, co-workers, and other folks-about-town to believe that this hypocrisy is rampant.  I find it particularly disgusting that it is now in vogue for the nouveau riche to get dressed to the nines and go to fancy “speakeasy”-style establishments in the Tenderloin for $14 single malts.  First there was just Bourbon and Branch, but now there’s also Rye, Swig, and I’m sure others—all places that none of the actual residents of the TL could afford to step into (if they got past the bouncers, which they wouldn’t.)  The TL residents have enough shit in their lives without getting their noses rubbed in their poverty by young wealthy douchebags.

Don’t get me wrong—poor/homeless people can be scary.  They sometimes yell to themselves, smoke crack, or shit on the sidewalk.  And that sucks.  But their lives suck more than you can ever imagine, and if you think the solution is to just sweep them under the rug, or out to Oakland, then next election you can vote Republican and see #5 above.

Pro tip: If you have time, there are myriad volunteering opportunities for helping the underserved communities in SF and the Bay Area.  If, like me, you don’t have time, there are many wonderful organizations that accept donations.  A few of my favorites:

St. Anthony’s San Francisco.  This is a one-stop shop for poor/homeless services in the TL, with food, clothing, medical and rehab services (and you can volunteer here too).
Athletic Scholars Advancement Program: helping kids from low-income households get athletic scholarships into top-tier universities.
Women’s Community Clinic: Provides testing, outreach, birth control, and health career training for the poorest of the poor women in the Bay Area.
Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto: Providing legal services to those who need it the most, for real.

17. Parking is tough, so learn how to work the system.  I could write an entire post about where and when you can park in the city, but that would get kind of boring.  As a general rule: you’ll struggle to find parking in residential areas at night (except on weekends), and downtown during the day.  If you need to move your car to avoid the streetcleaner, do it in the morning before work, not in the evening afterwards.  If you’re going out and you have a primo parking spot near your apartment, consider walking, riding your bike, taking an Uber, or, gasp, taking public transportation.  Then, get as drunk as possible to further make yourself happy about leaving your car behind.

Pro tip: If you’re going to park your car somewhere overnight, (1) try to find a spot in front of a house or apartment building, as opposed to in front of a park, business, church, or other place where people don’t live; and (2) don’t leave anything in your car.  If you follow (1) and (2), you probably won’t get your window smashed in.  If you don’t follow (1) or (2) (or both), in certain neighborhoods (including, without limitation, the TL, Lower Haight, Mission and Portrero), there’s a pretty high likelihood that your car will get burglarized.

18. Noc Noc is a better bar than Toronado.  I love the Lower Haight, and Haight Street between Fillmore and Steiner may be the best city block in all of San Francisco.  When most people in the city think of this block, they think of Toronado, you know, the bar with over 100 beers on tap.  Don’t get me wrong—the beer selection is amazing, and at 3 PM on a weekday afternoon, I love going there and letting the bartender introduce me to some amazing new microbrews.  However, on a usual weekend night, the place is packed with douchebags, the music sucks, and the lighting is too bright.  I don’t understand why people go here, when just three doors down there’s this amazing bar called Noc Noc.  It’s never too packed, the tunes are bompin’, and the décor is trippy and evokes a kind of “Beetlejuice-meets-that-Cure-video-where-Robert-Smith-is-in-a-cave” vibe.  They don’t have 100 beers on tap, but the beer they have on tap is always damn good (try the Peach Porch Lounger if they have it), and there’s a great selection of Belgian beer in bottles.  Just go here, dammit.

Pro tip: Normally, if you want to keep your secret spot secret, it’s not good to post it on your blog.  But I really want more people to go to Noc Noc, mainly because the only attractive women I’ve ever seen in the bar are those whom I’ve brought myself.

19. You can see great music in small venues. Yes, we get all of the big acts at Shoreline or Oracle Arena or sometimes at AT&T Park, and we get lots of really dope concerts at the Independent and the Warfield and the Fillmore, but you can see some hot, quality shows on the cheap at our little venues, such as Make-Out Room, Elbo Room, Slim’s, Bottom of the Hill, Amnesia, and Neck of the Woods. I prefer small shows—I often find them to be more intimate and more interesting.

Pro tip: Elbo Room also has some fun DJ nights, including “Soul Night” every other Saturday.  If you dress up, you get a discount!  Note to ladies: “dress up” = “don’t wear jeans.”

20. There’s a fun underground comedy scene. Some of you know this, but I had a brief foray into stand-up comedy, doing a couple of open-mike nights before I realized that, like all hobbies, I didn’t have time for it.  There are a bunch of regulars, and I got to recognize many of them and their respective styles.  They seemed to form a great community, one that I would have liked to get into, but the reality is that I’d never join a club that would accept me as a member.  This was not particularly relevant, as they didn’t really accept me as a member.  Still, good times, and I would recommend checking out some local comedy at some point.

Pro tip: If you’re gonna try your hand at the comedy thing, you can’t go wrong with dick jokes.  At least that’s what everybody here seems to think.  Of all of the jokes I heard in my month-long sojourn into the SF open-mike comedy world, I only remember this one:

“I like to do this trick called ‘the stranger’.  When I wanna get off, I sit on my hand for a really long time, so it falls asleep and I can’t feel it.  Then I have a stranger jerk me off.”

21. You are not allowed to make a left turn in the city of San Francisco.  Kind of a pain in the ass.

Pro tip: Some people like to say, “In San Francisco, two wrongs don’t make a right, but three rights make a left.” My corollary: “In San Francisco, two wrongs don’t make a right, but one wrong can make a left, if there are no cops around and there aren’t any of those pesky cameras.  Fuck those.”

22. You can actually get good pizza here, if you know where to go.  Since San Francisco is such a “foodie” town (ugh, I detest that term), I thought I’d throw in one food item.  East coasters, particularly New Yorkers, claim that SF doesn’t have good pizza.  I’ll concede that delicious pizza is not as ubiquitous here as it is in NY, but you can still get it.  Here’s the breakdown:

Pizza-by-the-slice: Escape from NY (various locations)
Italian-style: Delfina (in the Mission)
Chicago deep-dish style: Paxti’s (in Hayes Valley and I think they opened somewhere else too)
My other favorite: Club Deluxe (Upper Haight)

Pro tip: Pesto/potato pizza is common here, and it’s usually damn tasty.  Say what you want about our hippie culture, but this is one of its best side effects.

23. Due to a new city ordinance, public nudity is no longer allowed.  Sorry.

Pro tip: There are exemptions for certain events, such as Bay to Breakers and the Folsom Street Fair. There is not an exemption for Christmas.  I learned that one the hard way.

24. The touristy crap can be kind of fun!  San Franciscans rarely go to Fisherman’s Wharf, the California Academy of Sciences, or Haight-Ashbury, but if you have a friend visiting from out of town, or a 4 year-old nephew, it’s totally worth it to check out these places.

The Haunted Gold Mine was my favorite Fisherman’s Wharf attraction as a wee lad.  Note: the kid in the picture is not a younger me, nor my nephew.  This is just the first pic that came up on a Google search.

Pro tip: If you want to actually enjoy Fisherman’s Wharf, it helps to get drunk before you go.

25. Yes, we’re snobby.  I apologize.  Deal with it.  While writing this post, I’ve been gchatting with a friend.  She asked the topic, and I sent her a link to the article that inspired this whole shebang.  She replied, “i thought to send it to you, but i figured you would think it’s too elementary.”  I wonder how many of my fellow San Franciscans read that piece and thought, “this so pedestrian, clearly this man does not know his feces from his shinola when it comes to our glorious city by the bay” in a really haughty internal voice, while drinking some microbrew you’ve never heard of.  I bet at least several dozen.  And yes, I know that this blog itself has been quite snobbish (I like the part where I refer to Burma Superstar with contempt, as if I’m too cool for their tea leaf salad and mint chicken).  Don’t worry, the irony is not wasted on me.

Pro tip: There are a few well-known quotes that exemplify our general attitude towards our city and ourselves, which you can feel free to use:

“One day if I do go to heaven…I’ll look around and say, ‘It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.’” – Herb Caen
“San Franciscans are very proud of their city, and they should be.  It’s the most beautiful place in the world.” – Robert Redford
“We San Franciscans don’t think we’re better than everybody else, we are better than everybody else.” – Bumper sticker, circa 2007

You gotta give us some credit—we do love our town.  It’s okay if we’re a little bit obnoxious about it.  At least we’re not New Yorkers.  FUCKIN’ 49ERRRSSS!

33. On the End of 2012 and the Beginning of 2013

Tags

2012, 2013, cajones, Giants, MCA, Morrissey, Sandy, Sandy Hook

Wow, can you believe it’s been a year already?  Time flies, whether you’re having fun or not.  I’m a very reflective person, and of course I always get a little extra-reflective this time every year.  How did 2012 stack up in terms of other years?  Well, it certainly wasn’t 2010, that’s for damn sure.  Not even 2011.  For me personally, 2012 was a pretty shitty year, with the two dominant themes being heartbreak and working too much.  Both of these themes were directly related to this blog—the first inspired it (i.e., something to do to get my mind off of the pain), the second killed it.  I’m hoping that neither of these plays too much of a prominent role in my 2013.  For the first, time is slowly but surely healing that wound.  As for the second, my number one new year’s resolution for 2013 is to WORK LESS.  In 2013, I surpassed my minimum required billables by nearly 500 hours…I sure as hell don’t need to do that again.  Ever.  There probably won’t be a repeat performance by virtue of my not being in Japan, but even so, I’m going to make a concerted effort to make sure that I end 2013 with somewhere between 1950 and 1957 hours, period.  Don’t worry—for normal people, that still ends up being way too much work.

I have a few other New Year’s Resolutions:

• Attend at least one concert every month.  I had some decent concert action in 2012: Morrissey in Tokyo, Jonathan Richman, Devo/Blondie, Barrington Levy, and a couple of nights ago, the Jamaicans.  Other than a few other very small local gigs, I think that was about it.  Every one of these shows was pretty darn good, and they reminded me why I love live music (as I noted in my last post).  I realize that all of the concerts I attended in 2012 featured artists who have been around for at least 25 years.  I guess that’s how I roll; I truly believe that they don’t make music like they used to.  I have to point out one small note about the Morrissey show: At the time, the great Mozza’s band consisted of a large drag queen on guitar and 4 very young, very fit men who, at the show I attended, were wearing nothing but black briefs (which were very brief).  Coupled with Morrissey’s general sexual androgyny, the entire show reeked of homoeroticism, all of which was completely lost on the Japanese audience.  It was somewhat incredible.

I’m not sure that I need much more of that in 2013, but I certainly want more concert experiences.  Okay, and maybe a bit more of that.

• Not complain as much.  I have a friend from law school whom, for whatever reason, gets cited in this blog more than anybody else.  A couple of weeks ago, I was having drinks with him, and I started bitching about, hell, I forget…something, and he slammed down his drink and in a genuinely pissed-off tone said that I complain too much, and that most people would do anything for a life as good as mine.  I mean, other than heartbreak and working too much, my 2012 probably kicked ass.  I got to live in the city I adore with a lot of people I love, working in a job that pays well and keeps me intellectually stimulated, and just yesterday I bought an awesome new pair of jeans.  They cost a lot, but they’re really comfortable and stylish.  I’m trying to finally grow up a little fashion-wise.

• Run a half-marathon.  Yesterday I went to Sports Basement and bought running gear and new shoes.  The shoe part was incredible.  The guy had me walk and run back and forth a couple of times, then he told me that my arches roll and my feet point inwards at approximately 1.3 degrees, and so I can injure my first two metatarsals if I don’t have the proper footwear.  He guessed my shoe size on the spot, pulled out two different pairs of shoes, had me put a different shoe on each foot and run around the store, then asked which one felt better and sold me the corresponding pair, with a 30-day guarantee, and they gave me the AAA bonus even though I forgot my AAA card.  Sorry for the long run-on sentence, but the whole shebang took approximately 3 minutes and left my head spinning.  Anyhow, after all that, I feel like I owe it to Sports Basement to make this run.  For those of you who don’t know Sports Basement, it’s another reason that I love San Francisco, and I’m not even that sporty.

• Write down something every day.  I bought this little “one line a day” 5-year diary, which I intend on filling.  I’m pretty excited about showing it to my grandkids.

• Create a board game.  I have this great idea for a game that sort of combines Scruples, Trivial Pursuit, Celebrity, Mafia and Mousetrap (the last one on a slightly more metaphorical level).  By the end of the year, I need to have developed a prototype.  I plan on taking this pretty seriously and devoting a lot of time to it, so if I don’t write many blog entries next year, you can assume it’s because I’m working hard on my game.  Or stuck in the office because I’m failing at my #1 resolution.  Or maybe on an online dating website.  Sigh.

• Not be so afraid of technology.  I’m a technology lawyer, for chrissake—I can start to actually use my smartphone and stop being such an old fart.  First stop: Spotify.

Now that I’ve thrown out these resolutions into the internet, that means I’m bound to them, right?  If not, everybody in the world has the right to chastise me as a failure.  Crap, that’s way more pressure than I anticipated.  Can I take them back?  Unfortunately, no.  As Confucius says, once something is written, it may not be erased for all of eternity.  Of course, bear in mind that Confucius lived in an era before the advent of the eraser and “delete” button, but still, the man knows his shit.

I’m getting way ahead of myself here, already talking about 2013.  2012 isn’t over yet (at least that’s what I’m hoping—I really want to finish this post before the new year, but I just discovered Boardwalk Empire…you know how it is). [Update: I did not finish this post in 2012 because on December 31, I unexpectedly had to work all day.  My #1 resolution did not apply yesterday so it’s all good.]  Outside of my personal life, 2012 was pretty damned interesting, and I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the world events of 2012 that made me laugh, made me cry, or blew me away in general.  And as I am wont to do, I’ll present such events in the form of a top 10 list.

THE TOP 10 THINGS FROM 2012 THAT ELICITED FROM ME SOME SORT OF EMOTIONAL RESPONSE:

10. The Death of Adam Yauch.  Okay, I admit, in order to remember ten items for this list, I had to go back and look at all of my Facebook posts from the past year.  On May 4^th, I posted “If this is gonna be that kind of a party, I’m gonna stick my dick in the mashed potatoes. RIP MCA.” When I heard the sad news, I dusted off my old Paul’s Boutique mp3s, and thought back to my younger, formative years.  If you’re my age, your older sibling (or friend’s older sibling) probably introduced you to the Beasties when you were just a wee lad or lass, and you thought that Brass Monkey was the most amazing song in the world (and you envisioned an actual metallic primate when you heard it).  Yes, the Beastie Boys were clearly older than you, but not that much older, right?  MCA was way too young to die.  I’m pretty sure we all miss him.  The Beastie Boys were one of those few bands that everybody really enjoyed.  Have you ever heard somebody say, “you know what, I don’t really like the Beastie Boys.”  Of course you haven’t.  And if you ever do, you give them a back-handed bitch slap.  Right in the kisser.

9. Season 3 of The Walking Dead.  I’m really into this show.  I’ll admit that I did not like Season 1 so much–for many years, I’ve been a die-hard zombie fan, and I felt like the inaugural season didn’t contribute much that Romero hadn’t already played out years before.  But then came Season 2, which got me excited, and Season 3 just kicked ass (or is in the process of kicking ass, as the case may be).  Merle with a bayonet hand!  Michonne!  Prison zombies!  I don’t think I’ve been this excited about a show since Battlestar Galactica.

8. Hurricane Sandy.  I went to Columbia for undergrad, but during the big blackout of 2003 I was studying abroad in Australia, so I missed out on all of that fun.  I remember hearing stories about people walking home from work, and having fun spontaneous parties and candle-lit acoustic concerts with strangers in their buildings.  Although I was having the time of my life in Oz, I was kind of bummed that I missed it.  When I first started reading about Sandy (mainly through reports from friends on Facebook), I had that same feeling–it sounded kind of fun, and I almost wished I was there.  Then it started to sound awful.  Weeks with no power or hot water.  Apartments ruined, possessions destroyed.  I have one friend who was friends with one of the people who died.  Like the Japan earthquake of 2011, it was a painful reminder that Mother Nature simply doesn’t give a fuck about humans.  It also served as a frightening warning that with climate change, these events are going to increase in frequency.  I know that we’re strapped for cash in the U.S., but we need to start taking adaptive measures pronto.

7. National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. A.k.a., “the Obamacare Supreme Court decision.”  Unless it has to do with patent or copyright law, I don’t really ever read cases, but my mom wanted me to explain the decision to her so I took a full 3 or 4 hours to read it.  I genuinely think Roberts is a smart guy (I would never say that about Thomas or Alito), and I’m very happy that he chose to not toe the party line on this one.  Obamacare is hardly perfect, but I love the idea of as many Americans as possible having health insurance.  Some may call this notion communism or socialism; I call it common sense for a civilized nation.  I have no idea if this was a one-off for Roberts, or if he’s going to start taking the liberal approach on other issues as well.  Could he be on the good side during the gay marriage cases next year?  Oh man, once Obama replaces Kennedy and the SC is liberal for the next 15 years, the good times are gonna roll.

6. Call Me Maybe.  At some point last year—it may have been June, or May, or even when I was back in Japan, I noticed that a lot of friends were posting videos related to this song on Facebook.  There was the actual song, and remixes, and parodies (from SNL to Sesame Street), and all sorts of memes or whatever-the-hell you call them.  You know, like that picture of David Bowie from Labyrinth that said, “I just met you, and this is crazy, but here’s my labyrinth, I stole your baby,” and so forth.  I avoided listening to the song for as long as I could, because I knew I’d hate it.  Then in July I went to NY for my birthday and 2 weddings.  After my birthday party at Cherry Tavern, I took a cab back to Brooklyn with my friend, and this horrible abomination of noise (I hesitate to even call it a “song”) came on.  Fortunately, I was so wasted that I didn’t really hear it.  However, it came on again at the first wedding.  And then the second.  And then every single night out after that for the rest of the summer.  People: this shit is G-d awful.  It might be a new low for pop music, and that is really, really saying something.  I lost a lot of faith in humanity knowing that this song was the #1 summer jam in the U.S.  Thank G-d Gangam Style came out and rescued our nation (and the world) from the auditory abyss that was Call Me Maybe.  Let’s put it this way: I was not at all surprised to learn that the singer is Canadian.  This is their revenge for all of the jokes over the past however many years.  They’re all up across the border eating poutines and laughing hysterically.

5. Trayvon Martin.  This unpleasant incident led me to disrespect hardcore conservatives even more than I already did.  I do not understand why guns are ever equated with “manliness”.  To me they represent the opposite.  Real men can fight (or resolve their conflicts through non-violent means, but that’s not the point here).  Any coward or weakling can kill somebody with a gun.  The fate of George Zimmerman has yet to be decided, but I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if he walks, due to Florida’s “stand your ground” rule.  The phrase “stand your ground” is somewhat deceptive, because it implies that the person invoking it has big cajones.  Real men stand their ground!  The truth is that, it appears that the “stand your ground” rule means that if you pick a fight with somebody whom you outweigh by 90 pounds, and you legitimately get your ass kicked, you’re allowed to take out your gun (which you had hidden the whole time) and shoot and kill him.  Bonus points if he’s black (because then you can more easily claim that he was a “thug”)! They really should call it the “complete and utter pussy” rule.  I truly believe that hardcore conservatives in support of these laws get some sort of sexual arousal from firearms.  As I told one conservative friend of mine (who sent me an email with a bunch of pictures of big guns), I prefer to jerk off looking at naked ladies.

4. The latest Israel-Palestine Kerfuffle.  I do not mean to disrespect the victims of what actually happened by calling it a “kerfuffle,” I just really like that word.  The affair already inspired me to write one entire blog post, so I need not say much more on it, except that the whole world needs love, and the Middle East needs it especially.

3. Romney Loses the Election.  Some may argue that Obama winning the election was the real story of 2012, but not to me.  I don’t love Obama.  I like him.  I think he’s doing an okay job after being dealt a crappy hand.  But I really did not like Mr. Romney.  Since around the time I was born (i.e., the Reagan years), the sole purpose of the Republican Party has been to help the rich get richer.  Sure, they toss poor white trash a few bones by promising to do their best to eliminate rights for gays, blacks, Hispanics, and of course women, and occasionally throw in some rhetoric about protecting guns, but the bottom line is that the vast majority of actual Republican legislative and executive policies are centered around helping big finance, big pharma, big oil, and other big swinging dicks maintain their control of Washington, the U.S., and the world at large.  Most Republicans, at the very least, try to pretend that they will somehow confer benefit on the non-rich.  Romney didn’t even bother with that.  He actually produced bumper stickers that said, “Romney: If you’re not rich, go fuck yourself,” and he had no qualms using this as his campaign song:

Even though Romney was clearly and explicitly only trying to help the top 1-5% of earners in America (his infamous “if you make less than $200K per year, you can suck my hairy Mormon balls” speech made that clear), he still received roughly 49% of the vote, removing any doubt that a huge swath of the American public are misguided, bumbling morons.  But Romney lost, and then, when Obama tried to at least pretend to be nice, Romney, still not understanding the general concept of being a public figure, responded that Obama only won because he “gave gifts” to blacks, Hispanics, and young people.  Note: although I may of exaggerated some of the other things Romney said and did during his campaign, that last sentence was true.  I don’t often use the term “douchenozzle,” but I really can’t think of any other word to describe Mitt Romney.

2. The Sandy Hook Shooting.  Every year has devastating tragedies, and 2012 was no different.  The Colorado theater shooting, Delhi bus gang rape, Eid mosque bombing, and an unpleasantly high number of other such incidents all struck chords with me this year, but for whatever reason, I’ve taken great interest in the discussion Sandy Hook has inspired so far (and will hopefully continue to inspire).  In the past, the gun debate has been ridiculously black-and-white: we either need to remove all guns, or give every American (legal American, that is) the right to carry any sort of weapon anywhere at all times.  After Sandy Hook, the debate has widened: what kinds of weapons? What kinds of ammo?  What about the causes of the shooting?  What about mental health?  Should we have armed guards in schools?  What deters/prevents violence?  I’ve been reading as much as I can on all sides of the conversation, and I am a bit surprised to find that Michael Moore has written, by far, the best piece on the subject to date.  I’m most curious to see if this whole incident inspires politicians to grow some balls and stand up to the NRA.  Imagine that—politicians caring more about their constituents than about special interests!  In the end, I hope that something, anything, is done—more resources for the mentally ill, less access to the most advanced killing machines, more protection for schools.  No matter if you’re a liberal or conservative, I think we can all agree that we cannot allow these children to have died in vain.

1. Giants win the World Series.  I’ve already expressed my love for my boys in Orange and Black here, but I think it’s worth noting that in a year that was otherwise pretty difficult for me, the one memory that stands out more than any of the others is walking down Mission Street in my Buster Posey jersey, high fiving every single person I saw, screaming at the top of my lungs, and being filled with a euphoria that I hadn’t felt for the longest time (bear in mind that I was not in country when the Giants won in 2010, so I missed out on that fun the first time around).  I’m not the manliest guy out there (as you can tell for my lack of love for guns), but I pity anybody who refuses to have any sort of emotional connection to his or her local sports teams.  As a sports fan, you subject yourself to a lot of heartbreak, but in times of victory, the payoff is absolutely worth it.

So there you have it kiddies.  I was texting with a buddy of mine yesterday trying to think of a good quote to kick off 2013, and I initially suggested “may 2013 suck slightly less than 2012,” but he had a much more optimistic outlook on the new year that I will leave you with:

2013: Let’s do this!

 

32. On Live Music

Tags

concerts, Les Claypool, music, Phish, tragedy, tripe ramen

A couple of weeks ago I hung out with a very old, very dear friend.  We hadn’t seen each other in quite some time, and I was looking forward to catching up.  We have one of those friendships—you know the type—we can go years without seeing each other or talking or really communicating at all, but when we finally do see each other we pick up right where we left off and it’s as if no time at all has passed.

That’s usually how it is anyway, but not so much this last time.  Or the two times before that.  It ends up that in the past few years, my dear friend’s life has become more problematic than I could ever believe, and he’s become somewhat of an alcoholic.  This has put somewhat of a damper on our friendship, a damper that I hope is only temporary.  The whole encounter left me feeling somewhat depressed, but also inspired me to want to write.  I began penning a blog post entitled “On the Tragedy of the Human Condition.”  Shortly after I began, I got sucked away on a deal for work that involved working 10+ hours 12 days in a row—it made me kind of nostalgic for Tokyo (for those of you lovely people who read my Tokyo blog post before I had to take it down).  Then the shooting in Connecticut occurred.  My deal signed and I got the weekend off, and continued with my blog post on tragedy, haunted by a highly unwelcome source of new inspiration.

Then, on Sunday night, I decided to take a night off from depressing thoughts to go to a Barryington Levy concert in Oakland.  I normally don’t go out on a school night, and I knew it was going to be a late affair (doors opened at 10, Barrington came on at 1…I had to take the late-night bus home because BART was done), but it was damn worth it.  At 48 years old, the man still knows how to put on a show.  If you can’t remember who Barrington Levy is, I present you with his biggest hit:

Admittedly, he didn’t do so well with that track live, but he completely killed it on every other song so it was worth it.  I hadn’t been to a really great concert in a while, and this performance reminded me why there is sometimes no substitute for a kick-ass live music performance.  I got home at around 3:30 Monday morning and was on the Muni to work by 9, and as I rode, I was thinking about how in a world full of violent political unrest, mental illness-fueled murder, poverty, alcoholism, and unthinkable tragedy at seemingly every turn, sometimes it’s most important for us to focus on what brings us unbridled happiness.  There’s enough shit in this world; you don’t need to read about it on my blog (at least not this week).

As I rode, I thought more about how happy the Barrington Levy show had made me, and reminisced about other live performances that have put a grin on my face that lasted a few days after the music ended.  I think I’d like to tell you about these shows—maybe they’ll make you smile a bit too.  There’s plenty of tragedy all over the ‘net these days, and the world is ending on Friday for all we know [UPDATE: I was late on this post.  As you know, the world didn’t end].  Let’s spend a moment thinking about the things we love, shall we?  To this conversation, I will contribute memoirs on the TOP 10 LIVE SHOWS I’VE ATTENDED IN MY LIFE:

10. Byron Bay Blues and Roots Festival, (Byron Bay, Australia, 2003).  I liked to think I was laid-back growing up in California, but 2 harsh winters in New York my freshman and sophomore year of college made me into a bitter, cynical asshole, completely incapable of smiling.  I realized that I couldn’t handle a third winter in a row, so “Spring” semester (let’s face it, it’s Winter, not Spring) of my junior year I “studied” abroad in Sydney, Australia.  I began to get my smile back, but it wasn’t until we took a road trip up to Byron Bay for Spring Break that I entered a state of happiness that I hadn’t felt since leaving California.  Ben Harper and Jack Johnson were headlining, but I was more interested in Ozomatli, Violent Femmes, Shane McGowan, G-Love, and a bunch of local, slightly hippie-ish Aussie acts.  I was with a few close friends, and after trying to camp out on the beach and getting soaked in the pouring rain, we met some kind folks who were renting a house let us stay with them, precipitating a weekend of amazing cooking, kick-ass music, and complete and utter debauchery.  From that weekend on (I think the festival was 3 or 4 days), I started smiling, and didn’t stop smiling again until I started law school 5 years later.  That sure as hell killed my smile good.  The music of Byron Bay wasn’t too memorable (except Ozomatli—they are really fucking dope live), but the good times will forever remain in my heart.

9. Joe Strummer Tribute Night in Toyama (Toyama City, Japan, 2006).  On the fourth anniversary of Joe Strummer’s death, I found myself in Toyama, the small rural area of Japan where I had taught English for 2 years.  In the summer of 2006 I moved from Toyama to Kanagawa—a large step up (I was now striking distance from Tokyo). However, come Christmas time, I missed my old little Japanese shtettle, and I went back for a week to visit my friends.  One friend from my jiu-jitsu dojo was very into music, and he invited me to go to a Joe Strummer tribute night being held in a studio on the fourth floor of some random building (in Japan, the best shit is always on the fourth floor of some random building).  We ate some tripe ramen and then went to the show.  Arriving just as the first band was playing “Safe European Home”, I noticed that everybody was sitting around on stools, so I sat down, bummed a cigarette from my friend (because everyone was smoking), and took it all in.  There were 6 bands in total, 3 from Toyama and 3 from nearby Ishikawa, all playing all Clash (except for one band that also played some Mescalaros).  Nearly all of the bands were decked out in full-on Clash-era rockabilly gear (duck’s asses and all), and a few of the bands had a bit of choreography going on.  It wasn’t really a concert, in that the only people in the studio were the band members and their girlfriends, but all in all it was a great time, and thinking back on it, it reminds me one of the things I love the most about Japan—the beauty of a group of people devoted to a random subculture with the perfect amount of enthusiasm and passion to make it all click together.  BONUS: One of the bands was called “Crash City Fuckers.”

8.  They Might Be Giants (San Francisco, 1992).  This was my first concert ever, and there’s nothing quite like your first time (except, in this case, the seven concerts that appear below this one, both that is neither here nor there).  TMBG entered the mainstream in 1990 when they dropped Flood, and my sister became a huge fan, which, at that time, meant that I also became a huge fan.  By the time Apollo 18 came out in 1992, I had memorized and analyzed every word of every TMBG song to date (and that includes the songs on Miscellaneous T, the oft-neglected remix album).  I went with my buddy, and his dad helped us navigate the Tenderloin to the Great American Music Hall (I saw my first concert and my first tranny hooker in the same night!).  The Young Fresh Fellows opened up (yes…as in “She doesn’t have to have her Young Fresh Fellows tape back”…they’re a real band), and somebody in the audience stole the lead guitar player’s mike.  The crowd was very friendly, and helped my friend and I push to the front in time for the Johns to take to the stage.  I don’t remember the entire set list, but they definitely busted out “Birdhouse in Your Soul”, “The Guitar”, “Mammal”, and a fun version of “Lie Still Little Bottle” where John banged a beam of wood against a cafeteria tray in place of the snapping.  I outgrew TMBG shortly after I started high school, and that was fine—the beauty of TMBG is that while many music acts target teen angst, TMBG was really trying to hit on the angst of the 10-15 crowd, and I thank them for helping me get through those rough years, at least until I replaced them with the Kurts Cobain and Vonnegut.

7. O Rappa (Salvador, 2007).  In 2007, in between two teaching stints in a small university in Kanagawa, I took the pension refund I got from two years of teaching on JET and went to Brazil for nearly two months.  I explored Sao Paolo, hung out on the beaches of Floripa, hit up Rio for Carnival, took a riverboat on the Amazon, and eventually made my way down to Salvador, where I met up with a friend who had lived in Brazil a couple of years earlier.  He had clued me into O Rappa before, and they quickly became my favorite Brazilian band (and I love Brazilian music, so that’s saying a lot).  My first night in Salvador, they just happened to be playing, and my friend just happened to score us tickets.  We walked to the arena, a journey that included an attempted mugging from a group of very scary 8 year-olds high on airplane glue, and eventually found our way in and to our seats, which were pretty far up front.  They played all of their best hits, and the show just all-around rocked.  Since you may not know the band, here’s one of my favorite O Rappa songs:

6. DJ Kyoko/Hifana (Tokyo, 2011).  Many years ago, I flew into Israel and rescued a frightened Japanese woman who spoke no English or Hebrew and was getting the third degree from security at Ben Gurion Airport.  It ends up that she’s a fairly well-known Tokyo DJ, and we became friends.  Years later, when I returned to Japan for some lawyering, she invited me to one of her shows, where she happened to be opening up for Hifana.  If you’ve never heard of Hifana, then you need to remedy this ASAP.  Of all of the Japanese extreme electronic Hip-Hop DJs (and there’s a big scene for that over there, as you can well imagine), they are the kings.  I always appreciate it when a band that sounds great in the studio is able to add a new dimension to their music live, and Hifana more than delivered in that department.  Check it out:

Fucking rad, right?

5. Lollapallooza 3 (Mountain View, 1993).  Some of y’all may be too young to remember this, but before Lollapallooza was strictly a Chi-town thing, the whole shebang toured around the country, and always made a stop at Shoreline Amphitheatre.  I went with 2 buddies in the summer between 6^th and 7^th grade.  The line-up that year was amazing: Rage Against the Machine (before their first album came out…and they sucked!  Zach read from the Communist Manifesto for 20 minutes), Front 242, Babes in Toyland, Arrested Development (possibly the best act of the day), Fishbone (complete with Angelo nudity), Dinosaur Jr., Alice in Chains, and Primus.  Remember when Primus was the dopest band ever?  Did they ever have any popularity outside of the Bay Area?  And did they ever have a single female fan?  That Les Claypool was one odd dude.  I walked around barefoot all day, and severely burned the bottoms of my feet when I walked on the asphalt to the T-shirt stand.  Still, one helluva show for a 12 year-old to witness.

4. George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars (New York City, 2004).  I’ve seen George and Co. a few times over the years, but the most memorable time was my senior year of college, when I went with a buddy who, like me, was a die hard funk fan.  Senior year of college was such an amazing time in my life—going out and getting wasted with my friends at least 5 nights a week, taking interesting-but-pointless classes (“History of Horror Films” was a favorite), and in general, trying to squeeze in as much enjoyment as possible before entering the “real world” (which, incidentally, I wouldn’t enter for another 6 years after college).  The George show just kind of played into all of that carefree enjoyment.  The show was at B.B. King’s, which, despite being in Times Square, is a great venue—very intimate and fun.  George put on one insane show, and Eddie Hazel, the Nose, and that Indian chick who sings in that incredible high voice were all there on stage, along with probably 20 others (sadly, no Bootsy).  They played both Parliament and Funkadelic tracks, tearing the shit out of both.  I absolutely should have been around in the 70s, but since I wasn’t, this show was the next best thing.

3. Pharcyde (Los Angeles, 2009).  “Imani Booty Brown Fatlip and Slim Kid Trey, we do it this way, we do it this way.”  My sister put “Passin’ Me By” on a mixtape (as in, an actual cassette tape with a mix on it) she made for me in middle school.  I listened to it over and over again (I was a master of the rewind button), and eventually got the entire Bizarre Ride album.  My two best friends and I used to listen to it on repeat, until we memorized every word of every song.  For years after that, we’d get drunk and just sing the entire album, from start to finish—I think I probably still can do that.  Flash forward 15 years.  I’m chilling in my Hollywood apartment, studying some IP law, when a friend notifies me that Pharcyde is playing at the Key Club that night.  He can’t go, and I can’t find anybody else to join me, so I just go by myself.  It’s the first time in years that the original band is back together, and they stuck mainly to Bizarre Ride and Labcabin (because let’s face it, all of their other albums kinda sucked).  The audience was almost entirely dudes my age who had been obsessed with Bizarre Ride back in middle school, and you’d better believe we were all singing along with every song.  I guess the band members were all in their late 30s (or early 40s?!), but they were still as energetic as ever.  Remember, they got their start as dancers on In Living Color, so they have no problem bouncing around.  The whole thing was surreal and incredible—well worth the 15-year wait.

2. Pixies (Los Angeles, 2009).  The Pixies came to town about a month after the Pharcyde.  Talk about being worth the wait!  I first really got into the Pixies after they were already broken up, in the early ‘90s.  The Pixies got me through high school…and college…and most of life after that.  They’re just so fucking profoundly raw and awesome.  I’m not sure how else to describe them.  Anyway, my senior year of college they got back together and played Coachella, and a bunch of my friends who had never heard of the Pixies before Fight Club went, and it pissed the hell out of me.  I missed the Pixies consistently for the next 5 years, until I finally got to see them in their Doolittle Tour.  That was when they just went on stage and played Doolittle from front to back, with B-sides before and after, and at my show, an encore set with most of the songs from Come On Pilgrim.  During “Into the White”, I happen to peer over at a girl standing next to me who was texting her friend.  She wrote, “Pixies is rocking my world.  I feel like I’ve been fucked hard and left out to dry.”  That pretty much summed it up.

1. Phish (Mountain View, September 30, 1995).  I put the date in there because some hardcore Phishheads may know that show—it was the opener of the famous 1995 chess game, and is generally recognized as one heckuva show.  Let’s get the record straight here: I no longer listen to Phish.  While I acknowledge that they are talented musicians, I’m no longer into the “jam band” sound, and lyrically they are utterly pathetic.  To think I used to get really excited about songs about nipular paper cuts and mudrat detectors (ribbon reflectors, penile erectors, etc.) makes me smirk now and want to punch 14 year-old me in the face, but from the summer before 8^th grade (when I was introduced to the band at Jew camp) through my junior year of high school, I was legitimately obsessed with the band.  I’d collect tapes of their shows (which is what Phishheads do), and bought Phish books, was down with the “secret language”, received Doniac Schvice regularly…you get the idea (and if you don’t, that’s probably for the better).  At the time of this show, Phish was unequivocally my favorite band, and seeing them live was literally a life-changing experience. I’m not just saying that–I consider September 30, 1995, to be a turning point in my life—the night I decided to be a free spirit.  Everything interesting I have done in my life—my travels, my writing, my philosophical meanderings, my appreciation for art, my obscure tastes in everything, my beliefs in the liberal cause—all of this can be traced back to that Phish show. Was I sober at the time?  Uh, no.  But that’s largely irrelevant.  Kind of.  Although I only listen to Phish now on rare occasion, mainly for comedic or nostalgic purposes, I will never forget the impact the band had on my life, that one night in Mountain View.  And if I ever want to re-live that magical experience, the magic of the internet (and unabashed copyright infringement) allows me to do so:

So there you have it.  One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to go to at least one live show every month (the fact that I didn’t do that last year is pathetic).  If you’re around in the Bay Area, please drag me out!

 

 

31. On Hot Sex

Tags

Black Friday, charity, Jewish guilt, National Pickle Day, pervert, sex

Hello ladies and gentleman, but not boys and girls (because this post is for the +18 crowd only), today we’re going to discuss a favorite topic of mine: sex.  You know: doin’ it, makin’ whoopee, doin’ the horizontal hokey-pokey, makin’ love, the whole 9 yards.  This post is totally going to be HAWT, as the kids say.  In fact, if there’s a single Muppet clip that can sum up this post, it’s this one:

Okay, I lied.  This post has nothing to do with sex.  Come on now—this is a PG-rated blog, remember?  The real purpose of this post is to introduce (drum roll please)…

J’S SECOND ANNUAL CHARITY CONTEST!!!  WOOHOO! YEAH!

Yes, I intentionally used the lure of sex to try to get more hits for this entry, because I know that all of my friends are perverts (that’s likely why we’re friends in the first place).  Also, I hoped to get views from some random folks who searched for “sex” on WordPress, because I’m fairly certain that that particular term is searched for a wee bit more than “charity.”

What is this charity contest, and what are its origins?  I’m glad you asked.  One year ago I was living in Japan, and I noticed that, pretty much during the entire month of November, the Internet was abuzz with all sorts of articles, ads, blog posts and other wastes of time related to Black Friday.  Having never been one for consumption of earthly goods, this obsession/hysteria over retail boggles my mind.  I mean, people literally kill each other for new 50” plasma TVs.  Has this whole world gone crazy? (Answer: yes.)

Although I understand that the Black Friday concept is good for our economy, and, from what I understand, many Black Friday purchases turn into holiday gifts (and I’m a huge fan of gift-giving), I think that, as we engage in rampant consumerism, it’s important, nay, imperative, to recognize that a large sector of people could never dream of the luxuries we’re lining up hours in advance to buy and would be more than content with a roof over there heads and a hot meal.  I’m not just talking about in third-world countries, or even the poorest parts of America—there are plenty of people in expensive San Francisco that are in the streets begging for change every day.  And in my Jewish/self-righteous little worldview, I genuinely believe that those of us who are blessed to be able to afford all of these fun-yet-unnecessary toys have some sort of obligation to help the less fortunate.

I work in a big-ass law firm.  It’s hard work, and I get paid more money than I know what to do with.  Considering the hours, stress, and mental strain/agony I endure, I think my paycheck is appropriate.  However, if we factor in the amount of benefit I confer upon society, then I am grossly overpaid.  For whatever reason (Jewish guilt?), I feel the need to give something back.  I make various donations throughout the year, but sometimes it’s hard to know where to donate.  There are SO MANY freakin’ important causes out there, and so many different organizations established to get the money from us to them, so what’s a good Jewish mensch supposed to do?

That’s where you come in, fair reader.  I’m looking for the best of the best in charities—the worthiest causes that give the most bang for my buck.  So here’s the deal (in step-by-step form):

1. All y’all submit your favorite charities to me.  Please submit via my email if you know it, or facebook private message, or, if you’re a complete stranger (and I LOVE involvement from complete strangers), you can send an email to sfloveaffair@gmail.com and I think I’ll get it.  You may submit up to 3 charities.  Submissions will be accepted through the end of Hanukkah (December 16).

2. I will research all charities submitted.

3. Sometime between my father’s birthday (December 21) and National Pickle Day (December 27), I will announce the winners.  If you are a winner, I will make a donation to the charity you suggested in your honor.

4. No purchase necessary!  You just name the charities, I’ll throw down the cash.

Tips for winning:
–I like helping out people who are close to the action.  If you yourself work for a charitable organization, or if you have close friends or family members who do, please submit!
–In general, I prefer local charities to those world-wide—the fewer middlemen between me and the recipient of the money, the better.
–Although I will do some research on my own, I’m a little lazy, so if you include a descriptive blurb about your charity that explains what it does and why it’s good, I’m more likely to donate.
–Pick charities that are awesome! To give you an idea of what that means, here are last year’s winners:

5^th place ($50): 850 Yoga (yoga classes for residents of California state prisons)
4^th place ($100): Room to Read (literacy programs for girls in developing countries)
3^rd place ($250): Friends of Sausal Creek (preservation of a large watershed area near Oakland)
2^nd place ($500): A Better Chance (helping kids from poor areas in America to receive good educations)
Grand prize ($1000): Grow Dat Youth Farms (teaching kids in New Orleans sustainable farming)

One final note.  I’m going to get preachy here (preaching to the perverted, uh huh huh), but I don’t give a hoot.  To my friends who are lawyers, doctors, big swinging dicks on Wall Street, or otherwise fall into the “haves” category, I encourage, nay, beseech you to donate to some sort of charity this holiday season.  There is no doubt that we worked our fucking asses off to get where we were and continue to do so, but at the same time, we are absolutely blessed to be where we are today and this is something we must recognize.  For my friends in Biglaw, if you’re looking for a place to start, please consider making a donation to the Justice Gap Fund, which supports free civil legal services for the poor in California (or, if you’re not Californian, your state bar likely has a similar fund).  Remember, not everybody can afford to pay $400 per hour to have you look at cat videos on the internet, then draft a piece of crap document that needs to be re-written by a partner for an additional $800.

Thank you all in advance for your submissions.  Peace and love!

 

30. On Other Places in Which I Have Lived: Israel

Tags

David Foster Wallace, Israel, krembo, Palestine, Ralph Macchio, violence

It’s that time again, folks, when the Facebookosphere is chock-full of news, opinions, rants and other flotsam and jetsam related to the Israel/Palestine situation (I’m assuming things are getting equally heated in the Twitterverse, Tumblrena, and Pinterest-zone).  I’ve been holding back from espousing my own opinions (and mercilessly shooting down the opinions of others), but now I suppose it’s time to throw my kippah into the ring and tell it like it is—because I totally know the whole story on everything related to Israel and you should trust my opinions, nay, facts, above all others.  I wasn’t going to do this, but a very dear friend encouraged me to, and when a very dear friend encourages me to do something, I usually do it, especially if it involves me getting to be self-righteous and publicly share how I’m right and everybody else in the world (literally) is wrong.

I’ve written a lot about Israel, and my relationship with the country (or “the land,” as they call it over there) on various occasions on my different blogs through the years, and I want this post to provide a perspective different from that portrayed in my previous writings on the subject.  So let’s begin by talking about Israel as if the whole “conflict” thing didn’t exist.

In the wintertime in Israel, you can get these things called “krembos”.  They’re kind of like mallomars, but I’m assuming they’re kosher.  You buy them in these huge boxes—I think there are 40 to a box, and then you pass them out to everybody you know, or even to complete strangers.

The main beer served in Israel is called Goldstar.  Not Beer Maccabi—that shit is for Americans only; no self-respecting ‘Raeli would ever put that to his or her lips.  Goldstar is delicious and a 500-mL bottle of the stuff is the perfect remedy for the hot Mediterranean sun.

Most Israelis are Jewish, but when you think of the people of Israel you really should clear the traditional images you have of Jews out of your mind.  When you think “Jewish male,” you typically think of a neurotic, whiney, balding hairy guy with thick glasses and asthma.  Leave that mental image behind at the airport, ladies, because Israelis, despite their religion, are REAL FUCKIN’ MEN.  Here is your average Israeli man:

And the WOMEN!  Oh my freakin G-d!  Remember that chick you met in college who you thought was kind of cute but she was from Lon-gai-land (pronounced with a really obnoxious accent) and really JAP-py?  And when I say “JAP-py,” I don’t mean Japanese, you racist.  Well every single Israeli woman is 12 times hotter than her, and is into drinking Goldstar, eating steak, and giving BJs.  Not to mention the fact that she doesn’t mind crawling through mud and could legitimately kill you with her bare hands.  This is a run-of-the-mill Israeli woman:

And that’s all Israel is, really.  Just a lot of that stuff, and really really good falafel.

Sigh, if only.  The reality is that the Israel/Palestine conflict is a lot like herpes: it’s always there, it doesn’t go away, and those affected never forget that its there because it won’t be too long before the next flare-up comes, and that really, really sucks.  Let me qualify that statement: the Israel/Palestine conflict is a lot like herpes from what I understand.  In any event, we’re now in the middle of another pretty intense flare-up, and, as happens during every spat of violence in that neck of the woods, the worldwide blame game has begun.  Don’t get me wrong—if there’s ever a time to play the blame game, it’s during war.  Each side is intentionally killing people.  Whether you call the attacks “random” or “surgical,” the Israelis and Palestinians are each using violence as a means to some ends, whatever they may be.  Violence is very difficult to justify (to some of us, virtually impossible), so when your team is using violence, you need to pull out all of the stops when it comes to rationalization.

Looking at Facebook, it’s safe to say that I have far more friends in the “Team Israel” machane than in the “Team Palestine” refuge camp.  What can I say—I have a lot of Jewish friends.  Nearly all of them are liberals, so I was kind of surprised to see that just one week after my friends were posting about how Fox News was full of shit, this oldie-but-goodie was popping up everywhere and being treated as if it remotely represented legitimate journalism:

The same nice liberal mensches who blasted right-wing pundits for being close-minded and one-sided were posting this clip and claiming it to be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth:

Truth be told, I’m not sure I entirely disagree with this second video.  For those of you too lazy/not interested in watching, the thesis is that the reason the Israel/Palestine conflict exists is because the Palestinians want to kill Jews.  The piece ends by saying that if Israelis laid down all of their weapons, they would be slaughtered in a day, whereas if the Arabs and Iranians laid down their weapons, there would be peace.  Given the rhetoric I’ve heard from political leaders in the region and political professors back in my college days, I do not disbelieve (yes, that’s an intentional double-negative) that many, if not all, of Israel’s neighbors would wipe Israel off the map given the chance.  If Iran gets a nuclear missile on Monday, it would not surprise me if there was an explosion in Tel Aviv on Tuesday.  Maybe even Monday evening, depending on when the nuke was received and how long it takes to fire off.  Israel’s actions, therefore, are in self-defense.  If Israel doesn’t strike first and strike hard, with no mercy (sir!), it will be annihilated.

It’s difficult to write a serious blog post about Israel without including at least one clip involving Ralph Macchio.

But I digress.  The clip above (the Prager University one, not the Cobra Kai one) provides a justification for Israel’s use of violence, but takes the position that Palestine has no reason for attacking Israel other than the fact that Arabs hate Jews.  I do think it’s safe to say that Palestine’s attacks on Israel are not “self defense,” in that they are not meant to protect the Gaza strip from annihilation.  If Israel wanted to complete annihilate Gaza and slaughter all of its inhabitants, Israel has more than enough firepower to do so in a week (or a minute, if you recognize that Israel has nuclear weapons).  I think the Palestinians would put up a valiant fight and receive little, if any, support from their neighbors, but the result would be ugly.  This is all a moot point—for whatever reasons (world public opinion, basic morality, etc.), Israel is not all-out destroying Gaza.  Fucking it up a little for sure, but not destroying it.

So why is Gaza firing rockets on Israel, if not out of self-defense or hatred?  It’s pretty simple—life in Gaza is complete and utter shit, and this is due largely in part (can I say that—“due largely in part”?) to the actions of Israel.  Pro-Israel supporters will deny this fact, but believe me when I say that Israel’s hands are anything but clean.  Are the rocket attacks on civilians justified?  No way, certainly not to me.  But does it make sense that somebody living in complete shit would try to attack the force causing such shit-living?  I think so.

What it all comes down to is that Israel is in an unfortunate position where, in order to maintain its safety, it needs to take away the civil/human rights of others.  It’s a vicious cycle—Israel attacks the Palestinians and takes aware their rights in order to increase its security, the Palestinians retaliate with more violence, which incites Israel to attack more, and so on and so forth for all of eternity.  Literally.

I hung out with an old friend today.  She’s been avoiding Facebook these days because she simply does not want to get involved in the conversation.  Although this friend and I constantly debate on issues of economics, education, and politics in general—we’re both extremely left-leaning, but in very different ways—I think our opinions on Israel are somewhat aligned, although we’re both kind of optimistically/pessimistically (yes, that’s possible) agnostic about the whole thing.  I’m serious about the agnosticism—I hope you didn’t click on the link to read this looking for any answers.  Then you’ll be really disappointed—even more than you usually are when you read my blog.

The general concept in which my friend and I both believe is that that part of the world has been ensconced in war pretty much forever, and that hasn’t been working all too well, so now it’s time to try peace.  In our conversation, my friend even dropped one of my favorite quotes of all time, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” (said by a famous Jew, keep in mind). Here’s a video that aptly sums up the “war pretty much forever” part:

But “trying peace” (or “giving peace a chance,” as it is sometimes called) is not exactly easy.  Both sides will need to swallow a lot of pride and be willing to make sacrifices.  My friend pointed out that David Foster Wallace once said that in order for there to be peace in the region, Israel will need to accept that there will be some terrorism, period.  It may take a long time for the terrorism to go away—perhaps a generation or two—but it will go away eventually if Israel stops reacting to a little terror with a lot of retribution.  By the way, dear friend, I googled a bit and couldn’t find the exact DFW quote on this—can you please point me to it?  Is it buried deep in Infinite Jest?  I admit that I never finished that book.

Let’s say that again: in order to have peace, Israel will have to accept that there will be some terrorism.  It’s inevitable.  Will this terrorism be worse than the current situation?  Will more Israelis die if Israel steps down from its attacks on Gaza and its day-to-day sanctions and siege?  The answer is probably yes…and that’s going to make it a pretty damn hard sell for Israelis.  “Hey guys, here’s the deal.  Your kids, or more likely your grandkids, will experience peace—a beautiful state of existence that you have simply never known and can’t comprehend.  Unfortunately, in order to achieve that, we’re going to have to randomly kill tens, hundreds, maybe even up to a thousand or more of you every year for the next 5, 10, 20, 40 years.  How does that sound?”  It’s easy to say “come on, take the damn deal!” from my sofa in America.  Take the deal, but first, can all of my cousins and friends and other loved ones in Israel please move here first?

And we all know what happened to David Foster Wallace.

I didn’t watch the third Obama/Romney debate, but apparently there was one moment where the two candidates were basically arguing over who loved Israel more.  There is a (probably true) notion that in order to secure the Jewish vote, a candidate needs to kiss Israel’s ass.  Obama obviously didn’t need to worry about the Muslim vote (because he’s a Muslim, duh).  The conventional wisdom is that, if you’re Jewish, you automatically unconditionally love Israel.  A lot of people, including myself, don’t quite understand why.

I can try to explain, but first an anecdote (don’t worry—I’ll try to make it into a segue).  When I was teaching English in Japan, a fellow English teacher (who was also a friend from college) introduced me to a friend of hers who was a New Yorker of Colombian descent.  I was explaining how I had just gotten back from visiting my grandmother in Israel, and the friend asked, “so wait a minute—do you consider yourself to be Jewish, American, or Israeli?”  I asked him if he considered himself to be Colombian or American.  “I’m American, but my family is Colombian.  It’s different, isn’t it?”

It is different, in several ways.  First of all, “Jewish” and “American” are not mutually exclusive.  I wouldn’t ever say I’m a “Jewish-American”—I don’t think one says that.  I’m Jewish.  I’m American.  Judaism is my religion, and also to some extent (or even to a greater extent) my culture.  It’s not my nationality—that’s where “American” comes in.  “Israeli” doesn’t even fit into the equation.  As I explained to the friend, although my grandmother was currently living in Israel, my ancestors are not from there.  I can’t rightfully say that Israel is my “homeland”—as many people with Palestinian roots often say, the Israeli “right of return” is a misnomer.

That notwithstanding, there is a bizarre, cosmic, magical feeling that I and many other Jews get when in Israel.  I didn’t go on birthright (living in Israel for a year when I was 18 made me ineligible…and I always get annoyed when I tell people I’ve been in Israel and they say, “oh, on birthright?”), but I always hear stories from kids who went on those trips that begin, “I stepped off the plane, and I knew I was home.”  Quotes like that are unbearably cheesy and, honestly, a discredit to our people.  When Woody Allen stepped off the plane in Ben Gurion for the first time, did he say that he was home?  No—he complained about his back, made a joke about how he got an awkward erection during his security pat-down and asked where he could get some Chinese food.  Now that’s how a real Jew reacts to Israel.

And yet…I think I felt that same syrupy cheesiness the first time I went to Israel (well, not the very first time—my first time there I was 5 years old and apparently complained for the entire trip) and I still get that feeling when I go back.  When the airplane lands, everybody claps!  The weather is constantly beautiful and the people are so loving.  It always confuses the hell out of me when people talk about Israelis as these horrible war-mongers, because I can honestly say that, once you get past their rude exteriors, Israelis are the warmest people on earth.  And it’s genuine warmth, in no way superficial.  I always feel welcome and loved when I go to Israel (and not just because I lost my virginity there).

I “lived” in Israel for a year, but honestly, I was on tour the whole time, bouncing around from one volunteer program to the other, “working” in a factory in a kibbutz, “studying” Hebrew and history in Jerusalem, “researching” migratory birds in Eilat, and “farming” on a Jewish settlement in the West Bank (this was before a lot of violent shit went down—a year after I left the settlement was attacked and several people were killed).  I was 18 at the time, so most Israelis my age were in the army.  It was one of the non-flare-up times and I barely thought about any sort of violence.  I just explored the country—it’s small and in the course of a year I covered most of it.

In contrast to 18 year-old me, there’s now a relatively strong movement of Jews against Israel.  It’s part of the larger “BDS” movement—“boycott, divest, sanctions,” typically considered to be three peaceful weapons outsiders can use against Israel.  The general idea is that just because you’re Jewish, that doesn’t mean you need to support Israel unconditionally…or at all.  Here’s a clip from “Young, Jewish and Proud,” one of the more “hip” BDS off-shoots:

Groups like this really used to piss me off, because I truly felt, based on my own life experiences, that there was some intrinsic connection between Judaism and Israel.  “If you are Jewish, you have to support Israel, period”—that’s what I was taught, and it’s what I taught myself.

However, in my later years I’ve learned to question the intrinsic connection between Judaism and Israel, but not entirely.  I still support Israel and feel connected to the land (whether I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid or there’s something genuine to that notion I’ll never know), but not enough to condone every one of its actions, many of which I find heinous.  I disagree with nearly every opinion I’ve heard from any of my friends and family—from my New Jersey summer camp friends to my spiritual aunt to my Muslim cousins, no matter who I’m talking with, I’m tempted to argue (and admittedly, the result is that I’ve spoken to nobody on the subject of Israel in the past week except for that one friend).  If only somebody would make a movie for Jews who feel similarly to me!  Oh wait, my aunt and her husband did.  And it rules [SHAMELESS PLUG!!!]:

Okay, admittedly, I’m probably a bit more on the pro-Israel side than the film, but it’s close enough.

More than anything, the Israel situation tests the limits of human optimism.  How can anybody possibly maintain hope for any sort of resolution?  It’s really hard, but on the other hand, what else can we do?

There’s only one thing left to say: Shalom.  Salaam.  Peace.

If you read this entire post, I love you.

29. On Travel

Tags

gastrointestinal distress, Giants, hospitalityclub.org, India, Obama, Travel

Before I begin this entry, I need to say a quick FUCK YEAH SF GIANTS!!!  After all, this is technically a San Francisco blog, and you’d better believe that I was whoopin’ it up with the young whippersnappers in the Mission last night, watching as all kinds of garbage cans and furniture were set aflame.  The last time we won I was in a foreign country with somebody who didn’t care about the game and it kind of sucked; this time around I was in the city I love with a few hundred thousand of my closest friends.  I definitely yelled “yeeeaaahhh!” more times and high-fived more people than I have on any other night of my life.

Update: I kind of forgot about this post and now it’s the day after Election Day, so I need to say a quick FUCK YEAH OBAMA!!!  After all, this is technically a San Francisco blog.  I was actually in the Muni (public transportation) when Obama won, and my sister texted me “YEAH BITCHEZZZZ”.  If it weren’t for that, I would have never known.  It was a much, much weaker celebration than when the Giants won.  I’m glad my city has its priorities straight.

Okay, now for your regularly-scheduled program.  I have a buddy who is about to embark on a crazy year-long adventure, starting in Indonesia and ending lord-knows-where.  I’m very stoked for him—I hope he keeps some kind of blog or other media page so I can live vicariously through him.  I love travel, and can honestly say that little has shaped my worldview more than my extensive experiences abroad.  I recommend travel to every single human being on this earth who has the opportunity to do it.  It is possible to spend time in another country without gaining any new perspective, but if that happens to you, then you’re doing it wrong.

I was going to write my friend an email with some friendly, semi-solicited travel tips, but then I realized that all of the sage travel advice I’ve accumulated over the years would be best shared with the whole wide world.  So now, for your edification, here are J’S AMAZING TRAVEL TIPS!  Please note that these are not so much tips for a quick romantic week in Paris where you’ve planned out the hotel, meals, circus show, and all that jazz.  These are tips for extended travel, particularly in the third world (er…developing world.  Damn you, PC thugs!).

So here’s the thing: I was about to start writing these when I was hit with a wave of déjà vu, and I remembered that I’d actually written a list of travel tips before, when I was in Turkey two years ago (coincidentally, the last time the Giants won the World Series).  The problem is that I can’t remember if I sent these to my friends after I wrote them.  Thus, if these seem familiar, I apologize…but can you please let me know if I already sent them?  This is too weird.

Here are the old ones—somewhat American-specific, because we need more help with this sort of thing:

1. Yes, things are different in other countries.  People speak in different languages, eat different foods, and interact in different ways.  That is why we travel—to experience something new.  You are in their country, so understand that they are right and you are wrong.  Once you can grasp this, your travels will be much easier.

2. If somebody does not understand English, speaking louder and slower will not make them understand any better.  Try using hand gestures, pointing, or best of all, drawing pictures.

3. Eat the local food.  Yes, it might give you diarrhea.  It’s worth it.  Trust me.

4. Speaking of which, remember that abroad, especially in the Middle East and Asia, diarrhea is bacterial, as opposed to viral (like it is in the states).  Antibiotics and hydration salts are much better remedies than immodium and other medicines that simply dry you up.

5. If she doesn’t speak much English, and she’s willing to have sex with you after all of five minutes, follow the advice of Li’l Wayne and “don’t be surprised when she ask where the cash at.”

6. Remember: you are an ambassador to your country.  Every person you meet will assume that all Americans are exactly like you.  Thus, if you’re gonna be an asshole, say that you’re Canadian.

7. Many cities have some sort of “tallest building” or “high hill” that you can ascend to get an amazing city view.  Sometimes you even need to pay a fee to do so.  It is always worth it.  Whenever you can get a panoramic view of a city or other area of interest from above, you should not pass up that opportunity.

8. Be a “student of life”.  By that, I mean hold onto your student ID card well after you’ve graduated, in order to obtain student discounts.  You can always tell them that you’re in law school.

9. If you’re traveling for a short time (under two weeks), don’t bother sleeping.  If you’re traveling for a long time, take a day every two weeks or so when all you do is sleep.

10. Alcohol is usually the best gift and the best way to make friends.  Except in certain Muslim countries.

11. If you’re going to be in a country for a while, learning a tiny bit of the vernacular goes a huge way.  People are extremely appreciative if you actually take a few minutes to try to learn the most basic magic words.  Try learning “please,” “thank you,” “water,” “how much does it cost,” “where is the toilet,” and how to count to 10.  If you’re a man, you may also want to learn “you are very pretty.”  If you are a woman, you may also want to learn “don’t touch me.”

11. Yes, they know you’re a tourist and yes, they’re ripping you off.  If they are asking 10 euros for something you know is only worth 5 euros, don’t buy it.  If they are asking 10 rupees for something you know is only worth 5 rupees, just fucking pay it.  Stop perpetuating the stereotype that Jews are cheap.

12. Don’t drink the water—but make sure that you drink a lot of water.

13. Learn how to squat.  Toilets are very…uh…different in other countries.

14. On that note, if you happen to come across a clean, western-style toilet, use it.  You don’t know when you’re gonna see one again.

15. Always carry a roll of toilet paper.  I realize that many of my travel tips relate to the scatological, but understand that these are, by far, the most important nuggets of wisdom I have to offer.  I learned all of these the hard way, and it was really unpleasant.  Like there was this one time, in Jordan, where…well, we can save that one for another day.

Then here are a few new additions I’m making now (in 2012):

16. Join either hospitalityclub.org or couchsurfer.com or both.  These are websites in which you enter any city in the world and you can find people there who will meet up with you, feed you, and potentially let you stay with them for free.  I cannot stress enough how wonderful these sites are.  When traveling abroad, there is no substitute for getting a tour from a local.  Through these websites, I have been to places and seen sights that are definitely not listed in even the most badass Lonely Planet-style guidebook, and I have also made wonderful friends, potentially for life.  If you join hospitalityclub.org, let me know and I’ll give you a good recommendation.

17. Plan as little in advance in possible.  In developing countries, you can almost always find a hostel or hotel on the fly, and train or bus tickets need to be reserved a day or two in advance at most.  Ideally, I say that if you’re going to be spending an extended amount of time in one country, you shouldn’t even plan more than a couple of destinations.  Meet other travelers and ask them where’s hot.  Find the guy in your hotel who speaks English and have him help you book your hotel in the next city—he’s probably friends with somebody there and might be able to get you a discount.  There’s so much to see, and if you have a fixed itinerary (i.e. if you’ve already paid for hotels in advance), you might miss out on a fun opportunity to do something else.  I still regret booking that flight from Santorem to Recife too far in advance and missing out on a chance to do ayahuasca with a local shaman.

18.  Make friends!  Even without partaking in option 16, it’s easy to meet people when you’re an obvious tourist, because people will be staring at you.  Find young people who speak English—they’re all over the place, looking for you—and chat with them.  One day in Jaisalmer, India a guy in his early 20s asked if I wanted to buy a bed cover.  I said no, but offered to buy him a beer, so we went to a local restaurant and shot the shit.  That evening, he randomly came by my hotel and offered to take me to a party in a farm 20 miles down the road.  The “party” was a bunch of dudes sitting around, eating curry and drinking beer.  They taught me a whole bunch of dirty words in their local Rajasthan dialect.  The only one I remember is “chut pachut”, which means “pussy ghost.”  It’s a very high compliment for a guy who gets laid a lot.  There’s also “chut pakora” which means “pussy cutlet,” but I don’t remember the correct context for using that term.

19. Pack super light.  Whatever you need, you can get it wherever you’re going, for dirt cheap.  They sell shoes, pants, and even towels in other countries!  You can actually get towels for free if you stay in a hotel.  Actually, don’t do that.  When I was in India in the winter, after one extremely chilly overnight train ride, I decided to steal a heavy blanket from my hotel for the next trip.  A week later, my wallet got nicked.  I should have known not to do that sort of thing in the country that invented the concept of karma.

20. Just because a country seems sexually liberated does not mean that nudity is allowed on all of the beaches.

21. Don’t buy drugs from the locals—they might be working for the government and you’ll find yourself forced to pay a very hefty bribe.  Instead, look for the Israelis.  They’re the ones with the dreadlocks who are staying away from the pork dishes.

22. Bring a deck of cards and a set of dominos everywhere you go.  This will help with making friends, initiating/facilitating drinking games, killing time, and impressing locals (that is, if you can use the cards for magic tricks, or make really cool domino lines with the dominos).

23. Carry around a first-aid kit with bandages, pain killers, antibiotics, and band-aids.  You’ll need all of that stuff.  If you don’t need all of that stuff, try being a little more adventurous.

24. You should probably get some shots before you embark on a trip into the third world.  For SE Asia and India, I think you want to get inoculated for typhoid and hepatitis (A and B). Get a tetanus booster too, no matter where you’re going.  Other than that, I’m not sure you need anything.  Before I went to India, I went to a vaccine doctor (who was Indian), and he prescribed me a regimen that would have cost around $1800.  I then went to a doctor friend who told me I didn’t need most of that shit and got the cost down to about $200.  You don’t need to get vaccinated for Japanese encephalitis (or however the heck you spell it).  No, really.  Also, I’ve never taken malaria pills.  I’m really scared—I’ve heard way too many bad stories about people going insane.

25. Write hand-written postcards and letters to friends and family back home.  It’s such a beautiful thing to do.

26. Buy a present for your mom.

27. As cliché as it sounds, stay off the beaten path. Hop on a sketchy bus that leads to some place you’ve never heard of.  When you’re in a foreign country, just walking around random villages that aren’t particularly famous for anything can be incredibly exciting.  People will stare at you–enjoy your celebrity status.

28. Don’t spend so much time in the Internet café.  I know it’s tempting and you feel like you need to be connected.  You don’t.  You’ll have plenty of time to waste on the Internet when you get home.  Trust me.  Although I do have some fond memories of Internet cafes…like this one time, in Tokyo, I…am not going to finish this story.

29. Try walking around without a map—that’s how you actually find your way around.  Worst case scenario, you can take a taxi back to your hotel.  Or maybe a rickshaw, or a tractor.  You did remember to write down your hotel’s address, right?

30. If you get the option to do something, just fucking do it—you’ll very likely get a story to tell your grandkids.  When you do tell the story, you’re totally allowed to embellish and stretch the truth—nobody else was there.  Worst case scenario—you’ll do something that you never want anybody to know about.  That’s okay—again, nobody else was there.  And of course, those end up being the best stories in the end…

Oh, and please, above all else, be safe!  No really, I mean it.

Bon voyage!

28. On Being a Better San Franciscan

Tags

Boney M, dog poo, human poo, manners, parking, San Francisco

Hello friends!  It’s been a while since I’ve written a post, what with the massive amount of recent work and a few other things going on, but I just spent the weekend in Philly for a friend’s wedding and now, on the plane ride back west, I’m inspired to share some thoughts.  I liked Philly a lot—the city has a bit of charm, the weather was beautiful (apparently I got lucky; it ends up that the whole “it’s always sunny” thing is a joke), the cheesesteak was tasty, the tastykake was cheesy, and I went to this place called Bob and Barbara’s where the jazz band played a mean “Watermelon Man” and they had something called “the special”, which is a PBR and a shot of Jim Beam for $3.  Yes, you read that right.  Three dollars (actually, I think it may have been $3.25…after 4 of said specials, my memory is a little hazy)—Cherry Tavern, eat your heart out (or drink your liver out, as the case may be).

The point is, for a very short tourist stint, I was diggin’ the Philly scene.  And you know what?  I want people to dig the San Francisco scene too—tourists and residents alike.  We constantly like to claim that we’re the best city in the U.S., if not the world, and maybe we are, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement.  Although I am fiercely liberal, I have absolutely no faith in the government—federal, state, or local—to solve any of our problems, so I’m relying on you, the bold and attractive San Franciscans, to step up and take responsibility for maintaining the kick-assedness of our fair city.  And for those in my readership who aren’t fortunate enough to be based out of the Fog City, many of these tips can apply to your city as well—even if your city is New York.  Hell, especially if your city is New York.

Without further ado, here are J’s TOP TEN WAYS TO BE A BETTER SAN FRANCISCAN:

10. Be a better sports fan.  That’s right—none of this fair weather bullshit.  Right now we are blessed to be in a year of plenty, with both the Giants and Niners kicking ass.  But we all know that back before August of 2010, there were no Giants fans in the city, and nobody gave a hoot about the Niners in between Steve Mariucci and Jim Harbaugh.  I myself admit to being guilty of the latter, but no more.  Together, I want all of you San Franciscans to take the following pledge:  From now on, until the day I die, I, [say your name here], promise to make best efforts to watch every single Niner game.  I promise to love them even when they move to Santa Clara.  During the summer time, my blood will bleed orange and black.  If Giants tickets ever become affordable, I promise to buy them and go to AT&T Park, or whatever they’re calling it at that point, in order to make sure that we maintain our streak of sold-out games.  GO BUSTER!”

We can learn a lot from Philly sports fans.  True, they are horrible, horrible people, but they do love their teams in rain or shine.  When I lived in Hollywood there was a Philly fan across the courtyard from me who would yell at the top of his lungs during Phillies and Eagles games.  “FUCK YEAH!  GO EAGLES!  ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME REF?!” etc.  He also had extremely loud and discomforting arguments with his girlfriend.  I think he didn’t have a/c and thus never closed his windows, much to the dismay of all other tenants in a 100-foot radius.  Don’t be like him—just support your teams.

9. Pick up after your goddamn dog!  For fuck’s sake, people.  The other day I was walking with my friend and her little poodle through Fort Mason, and this couple was walking their big dog in front of us.  The dog did its thang, and the couple just sauntered away as if nothing had happened.  My friend called after them “hey, do you need a plastic bag?” and the dude yelled back, “it’s too wet to pick up.”  What the hell is that supposed to mean? We actually looked for the poop to pick it up, but were unable to find it.  I’m sure some unfortunate little barefoot kid found it later.  This is why I hate people in the Marina.  As my friend pointed out, the dude was probably a Republican.

8. Practice polite parking.  If you are blessed to see find a stretch of curb where two cars could conceivably fit, and you’re going to take the front spot, park as close as possible to the car in front of you to make sure that a second car of normal size (i.e. not a smart car) can fit behind you.  If the car in front of you is at the end of the curb (so it can get out just by moving forward), feel free to leave nothing more than a millimeter gap.  If not, try to leave the car a tiny bit of wiggle room, but just enough for it to get out.  I can’t believe I even have to write this, but I can’t tell you how often I see assholes taking up multiple parking spots when the rest of us are driving in circles for 20 minutes looking for parking.  And yes, I do stick notes on windshields that say, “Please park closer to the car in front of you to allow more cars to park”, so if you’re in Hayes Valley and you get one of those, you can thank me.

7.  Be nice to tourists.  We all want people from outside of the city to love San Francisco, but then when we do get visitors, we complain about how they have funny accents, don’t know how to properly recycle, and cause crippling traffic jams just because they want to drive down a zig-zaggy street.   The result is that we’re hesitant to do anything for tourists, and so they’re stuck with the cliché guide books that leave them thinking that San Francisco is nothing more than sourdough, the Haight-Ashbury street sign and the house from Full House.  Unless they’re Japanese, that’s not going to be enough to really wow ‘em.  When I travelled to Brazil, I found that Brazilians loved their country, and went out of their way to ensure that I loved their country too.  People invited me to BBQs, parties, and concerts, and into their homes for meals.  I didn’t need a guidebook because the locals would take me to the best spots off the tourist map.  More importantly, I left with the impression that Brazilians were incredibly kind, fun, sexy people.  I want tourists to leave San Francisco with that same tingly feeling that I still get when I think of Brazil.  I’m sick of people thinking we’re snooty.

SO, next time you see a pair of tourists standing on the corner of Powell and Market, looking frantically at a map and trying to figure out how to take the trolley to Fisherman’s Wharf, ask them where they’re from and take advantage of the free Spanish/German/Japanese conversation partners who have dropped into your lap.  Take them to El Farolito for some authentic cheap SF food, and then buy them It’s-Its.  Drive them up to Twin Peaks for a better view of the city, then take them to the Folsom Street Fair.  Show them what our city is all about.  It will be a rewarding experience for all parties involved (and yes, there is a big chance that you’ll get laid).

6. Support your local dive bar.  When I described that bar in Philly with the jazz band and the ridiculously cheap alcohol, did you get excited?  If so, then (a) I’m glad we’re friends, and (b) you probably feel, as I do, that we need that kind of scene in SF.  Unfortunately, it seems that more and more San Franciscans would rather drink $8 microbrews, fancy hand-crafted cocktails, and $14 glasses of pinot while listening to Lady Gaga than knock back a PBR while listening to some Skynard.  Hell, it seems like now the only folks drinking PBR are hipsters who do it because they think it’s funny.  Bottle service has come to SF—for now it’s only north of Market, but who knows how far the trend will go?  Remember when DaDa was cool?  It was my favorite bar in SF—now you wouldn’t want to go there…trust me on this one.

How do we fight this horrible development?  We need to get back to our dive bar roots.  Spend less time at Magnolia and more time at Noc-Noc and Molotov’s.  Choose Zeitgeist over RN74.  Hit up the Knock-Out instead of…actually I don’t know.  Truth be told, I think Magnolia and RN74 are the only two non-dive bars in the city inside which I’ve ever been, and I only went to the latter because I was trying to impress a girl.  It didn’t work.  Oh, I also like the Orbit Room…but you’re only allowed to go there if you go to the Mint afterwards, and I’d better hear you sing, okay?  And no Journey—they have an amazing selection at the Mint and you can do better.  I’d love to hear a sexy girl with a sultry voice do some Nina Simone.  Or some Patti Smith.  Or even some Joni Mitchell, for that matter.  Is that too much to ask?

5. Be a respectful cyclist.  Like many San Franciscans, my bike is my primary mode of transportation.  It’s good exercise, great for the environment, and generally an enjoyable way to get from point A to point B.  Bicyclists fought City Hall hard in SF, and the result is that we have bike lanes in major thoroughfares, stands for free bike repairs, and more bike shops than you can shake a U-lock at.  An unfortunate side effect that bikers, and I’m referring mainly to the young folks, have grown too big for their designer britches and turned into complete dicks.  People need to understand that the phrase “share the road” means just that, and it cuts both ways.  I feel your pain—I too wish all drivers would ride their bikes more, but for people who have to commute to places BART doesn’t reach, sometimes the car is the only option.

Bikers need to recognize that cars take up more space than bicycles, move faster, are less maneuverable, and take more time to stop.  Thus, bicyclists, if you have a bike lane, please use the goddamn bike lane instead of riding in the middle of the street.  That’s what it’s there for, you insolent cretin.  Or if there’s no bike lane, ride as close to the side of the road as you can, so that cars can pass you, you miserable a-hole.  Stop lights and stop signs apply to bikes the same way they do to cars, so please refrain from riding at full speed through a stop sign, forcing the car whose rightful turn it is to go to slam on its brakes to avoid spilling your guts onto the pavement, you monkey-nutted douche placenta.  For fuck’s sake.

4. Bring back the SF music scene.  Name the last good band you can think of that came out of SF.  I’m struggling.  The Grateful Dead?  Dead Kennedys?  Faith No More?  Are we counting Metallica? You have to go waaaaay back.  Other than The Bang, I can’t think of any hot SF-based music acts from the bulk of my lifetime.  The East Bay brought us Primus, Green Day (as well as the more “real” Gilman scene), and Hyphy, and E-40 hails out of Vallejo, but what does the city proper have to offer?  I know there are some extremely talented musicians out there, so can’t we please make some contribution to the music world to convince everybody that we’re not a bunch of wine-sipping, pork-belly eating snobs?  Of course, if the SF music scene was revitalized, I probably wouldn’t notice.  These days I’m mainly listening to Boney M and Jonathan Richman.  But I’m lame like that.  You guys, on the other hand, are cool, right?

3.  Don’t defecate on the sidewalk.  Because of those assholes who don’t follow number 9 on this list, there’s an unpleasantly high chance you’ll step in dog shit while walking along the streets of SF.  But if you’re really unlucky, you might step in human feces, or get to witness a local relieving his or her bowels right in front of the outdoor ATM, or 30 feet away from a playground (and these are both sights I have seen with my own eyes in the past couple of months).  Human feces on the street.  That’s just nasty.

Of course, I’m assuming that if you’re reading this blog, you’re not a street shitter.  Most of the people who poop on pedestrian walkways are likely doing it because they don’t have a home with indoor plumbing in which to otherwise take a crap.  As disgusting as it is, what the hell do you expect these people to do?  There are very few public restrooms in SF—it’s just not something we do.  Make no mistake—public restrooms are disgusting.  I remember the first time I went into a public restroom in Central Park in NY—I think I showered for at least an hour afterwards.  But I would gladly pay more taxes to get more shit into these bacteria-breeding sex havens (because we know what else happens in public restrooms) and off of the streets that I walk down every day.  Since City Hall has not figured this out on their own, we need to do things Cali-style—with a ballot initiative.  Now can somebody with more time than me please spearhead this effort?

2.  If something is on your mind, speak it, don’t tweet it.  Admittedly, I could only think of nine items for this list, so I asked the guy sitting next to me (who is originally from the New England) what bothers him about SF folks. He noted that in SF, people are very polite to your face, but then will talk a lot of shit when you leave the room.  Or more accurately, if somebody is in a situation with a person he doesn’t like, he’ll just smile and nod, and then go and tell all of his like-minded friends about the situation after the fact in the form of some sarcastic war story, as if he just went through some horrible, traumatic ordeal when he was cut in line at a bar, an experience that left him completely speechless at the time.  Then he’ll hop on Twitter and write,“hey douchebag with the popped collar and Warby Parker glasses, did you not notice that there were other people in front of you when you went to buy your apple-tini?”  This is what passes for acerbic wit these days.  Shakespeare is rolling in his 12-foot grave (Shakespeare had himself buried 12 feet deep instead of the usual 6 because he wanted to deter grave robbers.  Take that one to Mad Dog in the Fog trivia night!).

If this were New York, somebody would have said to the bar line-cutter, “hey asshole, wait your fuckin’ turn like the rest of us!”  If this were Boston, somebody would have said to the guy, “hey asshole, wait your fuckin’ turn like the rest of us!”, and then he would have punched him in the face.  That’s how real men solve disputes: with profanity and face-punchery.  No wonder women in SF complain that all of the men here are pussies.  Don’t get me wrong—New York is a city of assholes and Boston is a city of thugs, and I wouldn’t want my fair city turning into either of those, but I think we can afford to ease off the technology-enhanced passive aggressiveness and bring back a little testicular fortitude.  Speaking of which…

THE NUMBER ONE THING YOU CAN DO TO BE A BETTER SAN FRANCISCAN IS:

1. Grow a pair of cajones and negotiate with your landlord.  And I use “cajones” as a unisex term—remember, I like ballsy women.

Let’s face it—the biggest problem with San Francisco is that it’s getting to be too fucking expensive, and as the city gets less affordable, a lot of the flavor gets priced out.  The artists, musicians, activists, hippies, non-profit workers, teachers, philosophers, intellectuals and pretty much every one else who doesn’t work in the corporate world and/or for tech can no longer afford to live in SF, and this is to our city’s detriment.  The locals and old-timers are emigrating to more affordable pastures.  As I noted above, dive bars and good music are more and more difficult to find.  SF is turning into Manhattan, and just as all of my NY friends have moved to Brooklyn, so are all of my friends in SF moving to Oakland.  Well fuck that shit.  I can’t move to the East Bay—I don’t want to BART to work and I need to be able to ride my bike to where the Giants play.  SF is my favorite city in the world and I will not be priced out of here, goddammit!

The situation was already bad enough when I moved in 2 years ago.  And then the Facebook IPO happened, and Twitter moved downtown.  The following scene occurred again and again:

Nouveau riche tech person: How much is the rent for this tiny Tenderloin studio apartment?
Landlord: It’s eight-hundred…er…two thousand dollars.
NRTP: Sounds great!  I’ll take it!

And next thing you know, rents in SF increased by 30-40% in under six months.  It’s fucking insane.  The unit above mine has the exact same floor plan, and the woman who was there moved out about 6 months ago.  The new dude who moved in is paying $500 more than me per month.  I heard that another unit in the building that is similar is going for $700 more than what I pay.  I understand that landlords are just doing what they gotta do—hell, they’d be stupid not to charge these kids this much.  But honestly, it should be criminal.

Sadly, I fear it’s a one-way ratchet.  Perhaps number 1 on this list should be, “hey smart tech person: build a time machine, go back to 2011 and grow a pair of cajones and…”  Maybe I should be addressing this to the landlords, begging them to make housing affordable again.  I love this city and I don’t want it to turn into Manhattan, where only douchebag I-bankers and their lawyers can afford to live, except for SF, replace “douchebag I-bankers” with “awkward tech geeks”.  In the immortal words of the Isley Brothers, we gotta fight the powers that be.

And in the mean time, clean up after your dog (and yourself), ride close to the curb, and for the love of G-d, don’t take up two parking spots!  L’SHANAH TOVAH!!!