It's been very long since I spent any time in Berkeley. The place has changed enormously since the eighties, at which time it was already becoming precious and insufferable. At present I do not know anyone there. Unless that's where Vikas lives, but I thought he lived in the city.
I can thoroughly understand why so many e-commerce yuppies want to live in San Francisco; the Eastbay is basically a toxic sludge-pit of tepid mediocrity and shallowness. Good lord, there is no "there" there. From the distant wastes of Hayward and Fremont to the shooting gallery of Richmond, it's all Oaklandish sprawl.
Other than the fact that the University has a splendid library, there is nothing positive I can say about the Eastbay. Oh, and the Berkeley Rose Garden; it's rather nice.
AN UNCIVIL PLACE
I do not miss Berkeley. When I left during the eighties, it was still a fairly nice college town, verging in some ways on innocent cosmopolitanism.
By the nineties it had become a vain, self-centered, bigoted cess-pool, overflowing with smarmy correct thought, food cults, and pretentious quasi-intellectualism.
Parts of the area are still beautiful.
Unfortunately, occupied.
Just saying.
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For some reason the train had been stalled for a few hours (landslide? Snowdrifts? Trees down across the tracks?) and I ended up pooling cig...
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