A Year in the Fog

Has it really been a year? A year since I drove to work, a year since I had Wednesday coffee with Amy, a year since I stopped commuting to San Francisco every weekend, a year since I could pop by Club Fred or the Den on a weeknight for a pint or three, a year since I worked in the family business... It's so strange, since it doesn't seem that long ago.

It has not felt like a year. In addition to the weather-related element, this truly has been a year in the fog. I've felt that strange unreal drunkenness for a year now. The clouded sense of place that comes from being plunked down in a new job, in a new home, in a new environment; working in a new job which demands more of me than I've ever given before, living in a slice of domestic bliss I never imagined possible, in a City full of strangely plastic people who seem incapable of comprehending that their planet is larger than a few square miles, and that a plane ride or trip across a bridge is not an interstellar journey.

I've contemplated what I prefer about my life this past year. First and most obvious is being married. I never thought it would suit me so well, but I've grown into it pretty fittingly, and it seems to get more pleasant and enjoyable every passing day, week and month. There's the job: the job I struggle at, the job I have put my entire being into without any clear expectation of what it means for my future, but continuing to squeeze every ounce of motivation and energy of my being into. It's strange how one can truly focus such a massive force into a task one never expected to perform, or do it routinely, or well. I never really thought my future lay in corporate finance, and I never thought I'd be any good at something I didn't specifically enjoy outside of the timeclock's grip, but here I am, and it looks like the long haul. Time will tell what sorts of fulfillment it truly brings.

At the very least, it's an exciting time. I now understand the reasons why start-ups were so popular with young professionals buring the Dot.Com heyday: it's that feeling of really having a vital role, pioneering a new place in the economy, taking personal and professional risks as profoundly important as the monetary risks of your investors... It's a strange value that I cannot overestimate, and doubt I'll ever be capable of repeating. But for now, it's where I'm at, and I don't foresee any immediate departure. The latter can be taken as a good thing or a bad thing.

There's the strange excitement and complexity of living in a "hardcore" city. Being deposited from Fresno to say, LA or San Diego or Portland would be one thing, but to San Francisco is a true environmental shock. Even with the soy-enriched population removed, San Francisco is overwhelming as one of the old-guard raunchy cities of the county, strangely vibrant and alive and edgy in places, and eerily vacant and frightening in others. It crams the combined personalities of every other city I've visited onto one tiny square of land and injects it with steroids. It is a place that perhaps happened to me too late and at the wrong point in my life: at a time when the edgy urban life doesn't really appeal to me. A time when my longings are more centered upon the slower inner suburbia where I spent my last months in Fresno.

There's the weather. O God there's the weather! If I could think of one single reason to live the rest of my years in one City, San Francisco's weather would win in an instant. A City that matches my life-long appreciation for cold, gray days and violent winds year-around has no choice but to obtain at least some favor in my mind. It may not compare withe Eureka (which, of course, has the best weather in the world), but it wins over all other major cities hands-down.

Finally, San Francisco is nearly obsessive in it's sense of perpetual beauty. If you pick the right neighborhood at the right time, you may truly believe that you live in some radiant urban utopia, groomed to the exact specifications of your wildest dreams... At least if you're an urban geography geek like me. San Francisco shows what tremendous aesthetic wholesomeness can be achieved by more than a century of high-density commerce and free-market development (for which I must qualify: the more recent developments of the City show the horrors perpetrated by an all-powerful city government and a lack of any concern for the owners of businesses and property).

Then I contemplate the things which bother me about my new home. The first and foremost which stands out is the organically grown population which dominates the city. San Francisco is an incredibly non-native city. It's a place people come to, in order to escape where they come from. It's filled with twenty- thirty- and forty-somethings attempting to escape rural roots, conservative parents, bad weather, social norms, and reality. It's a commune of individuals who have found a city where they can live out their fantasy for as long as the outside world chooses to let them. The outside world, of course, is a big place, and able to shrug off the slight inconvenience of allowing such a place as San Francisco to perpetuate itself. Thus the denizens of this city are capable of perpetually evading or ignoring reality, and cocooning themselves in the fog, day after day. From drugs to night life to the stench of homeless people and pigeons (who are for most purposes treated as the same brand of urban wildlife, to neither be eliminated nor quarantined) to the endless rounds of protests and deliberate inconveniences perpetrated by the few on the many, San Francisco is a city without any concept of the massive machinery which created it and keeps it going.

I have been incredibly jaded by the promises of this city. In Fresno, I could be what I was, do what I wanted, and had many social opportunities. I had friends, coffee houses, clubs, and a small enough population inhabiting them all that I knew everyone. It wasn't any sort of rural utopia - it was a very cosmopolitan bunch of neighbors both young and old, who enjoyed the same sense of life, but weren't so constantly plagued by such a high density of outsiders and social turn-over. Fresno's enjoyable nests of civilization had the perfect density, the perfect size and the perfect ratios. In San Francisco, the feelings and the philosophies are there, but they're all blown out of all human proportion by crystal meth and performance enhancers. The neighborhood businesses are built to cater to outsiders, not residents - from bars and pubs to restaurants and coffee houses. It's strange that such a pedestrian environment can be such a commutter mall, but it is.

I am constantly plagued with the realities of the real estate market here. I throw copious quantities of my money into the "privelage" of living here, without the domestic opportunities offered me in places more desireable on so many other counts. San Francisco enforces the sort of market controls which perpetuate class divisions and prevent social mobility. It enforces the idea that if you want to rise, you must ask for a handout by those in power, or stay where you are and keep going to those jobs. If you are a developer, you must set aside housing for the poor, as long as you do it in larger quantities in the poorer neighborhoods. The wage market is skewed by a false housing market which prevents any reasonable leap from tenant to home-owner without a total change in professional endeavor. One cannot tell most days whether the stench of the city is from the defecation of the homeless or from the old money in the flats above them.

After a year in the fog, I have realized that San Francisco is a city of too many extremes for me. The beauty of the beautiful areas is so disarming that it makes you forget how frightening the ugly parts are, until you take a few steps down the street and smell it. The active, throbbing neighborhoods are charming and enticing until you step closer and realize you're lost in a sea of THC and soy protien. The old homes and tall buildings are beautiful, until you realize that if you intend to live in the city at all, you will be staying where you are, and will not try to rock the boat.

A year in the fog, and I don't foresee any imminent chances of departure. A year in the fog, and I want so many things that are just not emerging from that fog. I want to settle myself somewhere between where I come from and where I am. Somewhere that isn't as frightening and unwholesome. One day, after I've done my time here, I hope to leave the fog, and find my home.