Quote:
Originally Posted by 709
Yeah, but I find that sentiment incredibly beautiful as well. I dated a Parisian for a year, back in my 20s, and flying her to my home on the shore of Lake Michigan, I got choked up when she first saw the lake: "You said it was a lake. This is a sea!"
Indeed it is. Sometimes it takes seeing someone with googly-eyes looking at your backyard to realize just how great you have it.
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So true. I love to have people visit and show them around. I get sort of prideful, like it reflects well on me to live in proximity to such cool shit. And then I see it anew through their eyes and am impressed all over again. Like the stuff that light and fog does around the Bay, or how the fog literally pours over the hills like an advancing tidal wave, or how the costal hills smell in the fall.
It kills me, what's happening to SF, and the Bay Area. It's been fairly expensive for as long as I can remember, but there was plenty of room for weirdness and subculture and off the beaten path. You could drive a few miles and be in some kind of hippy encampment, or weird little rural setting.
Now, it's just more and more whatever kids with money like, and kids with money aren't that soulful. They like high end gyms, and high end restaurants, and high end clubs. They like expensive knickknacks. The Napa Valley still had a bit of small town charm until recently, now it's just a playground for the super wealthy. All the little coastal towns are one big B&B with local businesses supplanted by expensive antique and gift shops. There are whole swaths of SF where I spent parts of a disreputable young adulthood hanging in dive bars and punk clubs that are nothing but office towers and places that cater to the our new Tech Gods. Even Oakland, seemingly invulnerably downscale, is being overrun by the kids priced out of SF, which means they're pricing out the locals. I've heard Oakland called "the new Brooklyn" which makes me want to go on a killing spree. At least the South has room for ne'er-do-wells such as myself.