INDUSTRIAL AUTUMN

In a port city one expects wild creatures to inhabit the streets. Wharf rats, lizards, feral cats, and several varieties of sub-human, all living together in imperfect harmony when not fighting over booze, ciggies, or small bits of dead meat. Some are more socialized than others, of course.
The sub-human element is perhaps the least acclimatized.
In a city like San Francisco, they require drugs.
And, naturally, a political voice.

No, I do not fondly remember the occupy movement that encamped down at the beginning of Market Street and made Ferry Plaza so monumentally unhealthy. Most of those people were unwashed, uneducated, unwholesome, and the staggering epitome of bourgeois.
Entitled middle class poseurs and faux socialists.
Also Jack Hirschman.

But!

They have been replaced by well-tailored shallow careerists, who have driven up the rent while driving out the working classes. Soon everything that made this city unique will be gone, and Ed Lee will finally have his world-class metropolis.

Which is what the real-estate speculators also want.


You know, I really miss the raccoons. They used to overturn garbage cans, fight cats, and threaten the damned chihuahuas and other icky lap dogs. The recent arrivals love their nasty little canines, and quite a few of them value those loathsome beasts above the human residents of this city.
Newcomer biped and quadruped both pull up their refeened noses when confronted with lower middling long-time residents.

We need more sailors, whores, stevedores, machinists, printers, fork-lift operators, welders, bar tenders, and bricklayers.

And far fewer programmers, marketing types, junior investment bankers, real estate bozos, and Ed Lee.


Plus we need raccoons, possums, rats, and coyotes.


Like there used to be.





There should also be places where a person can wander around enjoying the smells of tar, petrol, rotten wood, wet cement, rusty machines, roasting coffee, damp jute, decaying leaves, bacon, and his own pipe.

My pipe smells good, you dry-cleaned hosebags.
Good!


Fortunately, Chinatown is still pretty real, and caters to an unpretentious crowd. Yes, there are stupid tourists and arrogant Mandarin speakers wandering around and lowering the quality of life, but it is still a far better place than North Beach, which is now divided between artistic types plotting a poetry plaza on Vallejo Street, upscale e-commerce capitalists evicting poor people, trust-fund bohemians, European visitors orgasming over the gemutliche Europeanity of it all, and meaningful beatnik wannabees.
Plus Ed Lee.

Last night I could smell roast duck on the air long after most of the restaurants had closed for the evening. Chinatown was softer in the darkness, a row of glowing streetlights on Waverly progressing in a graceful line from the Church toward the painted Hunanese place two blocks away, where old New King Tin Restaurant (擎天酒樓) had once been.
The sounds of opera fuelled dreams while I smoked.

It was rather wonderful.

Nobody assaulted me with their modern attitude towards tobacco, or sicced their icky little Mexican mongrel hound on me. No one told me about their traumas, trigger warnings, unique digestive fragility, suffering while growing up in the rest of the country, or how I should become a vegetarian, legalize marijuana, avoid GMOs, eat kale, and save the poor stupid stunted natives in the Amazon because inbred stone-age illiterates are a priceless resource with unimaginable spiritual wisdom.


Peace.



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