und1sk0 | your city aint that great

let loose on the roommate after hearing one too many jokes about cleveland..

if you grew up in SF, listen up:

* your public transportation is embarrassingly bad; privatization of the SF municipal rail, BART and Caltrain are all failed experiments and the "free market" wants it both ways: cheap transportation of labor but restricted public funding of transportation. sorry, public transportation needs to be truly publicly funded and not run as a for profit business; and industry must chip in it if expects to reap the benefits. why can't the bay area get this right? [ETA: bad in SF, nearly nonexistent in Cleveland.. I am comparing SF to Europe/Canada, etc other places that get pub. xport right.]

* if you grew up in the bay area, chances are you are a dullard, entitled, smug gadabout with no class and no sense of culture (beyond, perhaps, 1960s counter culture and its offspring or your chosen gender/race identity). this is not universally true, but there is a softening of the mind that happens to people who live sheltered, entitled lives. i am not immune, but the hardships of coming from an economically depressed, yet vibrantly multi-cultural place like cleveland has i think better prepared me to truly be open to new ideas, arts, music and culture than many of the insular SF natives I have met. sorry, but it's true and everyone from outside of the Bay Area knows it (although few openly acknowledge it). part of it is poor education, part of it is geopolitical isolation, and part of it is, i don't know, not having real weather. who knows why?

[ETA obviously i am exaggerating.. but have you ever noticed that ppl in SF tend to talk about the same four or five topics over and over, endlessly, until the brain numbs? maybe it's my fault for having boring friends..]

* yours is a racist, segregated city. and I know racist, because east side cleveland = black and west side = eastern european / german / polish. still, clevelanders manage to intermingle better than natives of san francisco, who often give lip service to diversity without actually being diverse at all.

* bagels. can't get 'em in San Francisco.. what passes for corned beef is horrid. you have to go to mt view to find a decent deli (dittmer's).. san francisco's food scene lacks soul. oakland's doesn't, but oakland is quickly going the way of the mission in terms of gentrification. there is wonderful food in san francisco, to be sure, but it is not the same as a street-corner gyro in the flats or perogies out in rocky river or venison jerky in ashtabula. and yes, there is some terrible, terrible food in the midwest. skyline chili? awful. these days, sf is no more a food mecca than las vegas. why is that?

* SF politics are near anarchy. now, i love the newsome/daly show as much as the next liberal wonk, but sometimes it is just embarrassing to have to explain to a normal person, a normal progressive even, the machinations of myopic SF identity politics and the clowning around in city hall. progressive politics in places like oakland, cleveland, detroit, baltimore, etc are about solving real hard problems. it should be the same in SF. often, it's about looking and sounding like a fucking idiot to the rest of the world. I am talking to you, Chris Daly.

Now, I have lived in SF for nearly 15 years and I will probably continue to live in it for many years to come. I imagine living most of the rest of my life in california somewhere. but I get sick of hearing about how much better it is than everywhere else on the planet, especially from people who haven't really traveled outside of the bay area at all.

San Francisco, you are not the only city in the world. i love you, but get the fuck over yourself.