The temperature is about 75 degrees Fahrenheit, there are no clouds in the sky, butterflies are coming from the colorful flowers in the foliage, the birds are singing. The air is perfumed with the sweet scents of flowers.
A block from where you live, in the outer Richmond district, is Mountain Lake. This is where Juan Bautista de Anza, in 1775, made his encampment for the settlement of the northernmost point of the Spanish empire. Half a mile away, the Presidio would be established, it is about that distance to the Golden Gate bridge. So you must paint in the sound of fog horns in the background.
This is where I live, one of the most beautiful places on earth. Despite the rumors, this is actually the border of the fog belt. Here we get sunshine almost every day, nine months out of the year. Otherwise, it is winter, our rainy season.
Like most of the rest of urban America, we have our downtown dominated by skyscrapers, of course, and hard on that our starkly grey inner city, the Tenderloin. But when you think of San Francisco, those quickly fade, banished the images of our hills, Golden Gate Park, the quaint produce markets that line the "village streets" of our neighborhoods. We micro-divide our town into these neighborhoods to the point of the ridiculous. Every few blocks claims an identity of its own for reasons of commerce(real estate values) as much of composition. The difference between Hayes Valley and the Western Addition is all in the mind of the (property) holder. At least the upper and lower Haight are demarcated by how high you climb the hill, so there's some sense to it.
Somewhere in town, every weekend of the summer, artisans booths, food booths, and music take over some street and make it the center of the neighborhood. We have more street fairs than you can shake a stick at it here, and then the summer is never officially over until the Blues Festival, at Fort Mason, looking down from the meadow onto the Golden Gate Bridge, in late September.
This is the paradise I am leaving, in order to seek my destiny, and that of the GENERATOR 21, in the "Silicon Alley" of New York City.
"What? Are you nuts?"
San Francisco may be beautiful indeed, but the MultiMedia Gulch is overrated, the housing situation here is abysmal; this city remains basically and foremost a city of the young, who are just beginning their Earth School adventures, can afford to make silly mistakes, collect humiliations, live on a shoestring and ameliorate the panic with bong hits and booze.
New York remains the center of the universe.
Despite our much bally-hooed "cutting edge" closeness to the plethora of high tech companies just down Highway 101 in the Silicon Valley, some of the most exciting web sites on the Internet are *not* being developed here in San Francisco. Instead they can found in places like Vancouver, B.C.; Boston, Mass.; Sydney, Australia; and New York City.
San Francisco is the city of website as rock band, and I've developed a site that plays jazz.
I shall always love San Francisco, of course. After nearly eight years, part of the energy and magic of this city has imbued itself in my veins. It has redeemed the memory of California, a place I never planned to live and never came to by my own choosing, for me. But I'm an East Coast kind of guy, who believes in lasting friendships, history, and hard-headedness. San Francisco will always be a city of transients, of mavericks, misfits and refugees. Like most of California, it is too ahistorical and shallow for my blood. "Friends forget you," is a California sentiment, not one you would harken to in New England. I have always promised myself that I would live in New York City before I died, and fate seemed to have given me the nudge, at last.
Between now and the time when your Butterfly Soul alights in New York there will be a few minor disruptions of the publishing schedule here, but rest assured that we'll be here every week. So keep coming back. I should have quite a few tales of travel in America to share with you.
Our Editor does listen!