Country Mouse, City Mouse

I have spent the past three days in San Francisco. This does not make me an expert on San Francisco. This only makes me the observer of the part of San Francisco near Union and Polk. However, this has never stopped me before from offering my unwanted observations.

* San Francisco seems to be like New York, but more clean.
* I have noticed a strange absence of black people. Maybe I’m just in the wrong part of town. However, I don’t see them in the crowds near Union Square, or in the part of San Francisco near Union and Polk, or really, anywhere else. Not as many as you would see in Atlanta.
* What I see is a lot of Asian people, particular on the buses. The average age of an Asian resident of San Francisco must be 65. All seem superannuated but Chinatown takes up several city blocks and in no way seems like a community in decline.
* San Francisco has its share of panhandlers, but we haven’t bumped into anyone really aggressive yet. San Francisco has about as many panhandlers as Atlanta has crazy homeless people in the middle of a psychotic breakdown, which is a lot.
* San Francisco is hilly. Very hilly. You had better be willing and able to walk up hills in San Francisco if you’re going to do any walking. This isn’t New York walking, where everything is semi-flat. San Francisco is a hilly city.
* My wife used to live in San Francisco – Oakland, anyway – but abandoned it. Two reasons. The first was that many of her friends died of AIDS. The second was the 1989 Earthquake, which gave her pause.
* I haven’t seen a lot of outré gay people, but as my wife says, we’re in the wrong part of town for that. We seem to be (temporarily) located in a little whitebread Yuppie part of town. Everyone looks very trendly. -1 Social penalty for being overweight.

What I saw, however, pleased me. Maybe it’s because I’m a fascist at heart (joke) but I like cities to be clean and providing foods that please me. (“How do you find a good restaurant in San Francisco? Open the door.”) I imagined myself relocating here, and all I’d need would be to make a quarter of a million dollars a year to afford it.

This got me thinking about the differences between living in a city – a big city, like say New York, and living in a suburbia. In each of them, you get a tradeoff.

First, big cities stand for excellence. While walking about today I stopped at a little hole-in-the-wall magazine store. Little did I realize that there’d be a cornucopia of magazines and world newspapers. You get off-the-beaten path bookstores. Every meal is delicious. If you wish to live a life that’s at a little bit of a higher level, the city – any big city that’s more that a Columbus, more that just an aggregation of population – is the place to be.

However, there is no convenience to city life. None at all. It’s expensive as hell. There’s no parking; a big city is usually no place for a car. If you want to go somewhere in your car, you’ll spend 20 minutes trying to find a place to park it. Which consigns you on most days to public transportation – which is well run, but you have to wait for it. Most of city life is spent on waiting for transportation. If you have no car, you have to replenish your groceries day by day. Waiting 10 minutes for this bus, 15 minutes for the crosstown, standing up in the bus all the way down because the aisles of the bus are already two abreast.

There are all sorts of aggravations that wear on your brain. The panhandling. The noise and the filth. The expense. It takes a strong physical – and emotional – constitution to live in a city; New York wore me out in about two years. (CINCGREEN was always at his craziest in New York.)

And second, let’s look at life in suburbia or in a well-equipped small town. Convenience is the hallmark. If I want to go and eat Chinese food in Atlanta, I climb in my car, drive around, and eat Chinese food. If I want an ice cream cone afterwards, I just pull through McDonald’s and get one. If I want new pants, I don’t have to walk six blocks – I just go to Wal-Mart which has several pairs of cheap and sturdy new pants. All of the staples of life are easy to obtain.

Unfortunately, there’s a dreary sameness to it all. If you want anything out of the ordinary, you won’t find it in the suburbs, or in the exurbs. It will always be the same movies, the same underpopulated bookstore, the same opinions and the same dull people. The land of fast food and “fast media”. It’s convenient, but it’s bland.

I skip mentioning the small towns, the places that my wife calls “a spot in the middle of the road”. The places that everyone with any ambition at all escapes, the places where it’s a good place to die.

I don’t know if I have any more years of big city life left in me. The big city is a great place to visit, but I don’t know if I would want to live there, even in Toronto. That old Jim Croce song comes to mind.

“I learned a lot of lessons awful quick
And now I’m telling you
That they were not the nice kind.”