Tuesday 9-21-04 South of Market

Tuesday 9-21-04 South of Market

San Francisco, Tuesday afternoon about 4:00 PM. I’ve just driven up from Palo Alto. The journey northward was uneventful. Embarcadero on-ramp to 101, then 12 to 15 miles north to California Highway 92 west to Interstate Highway 280—the four-lane freeway north to San Francisco ending literally at 4th Street in the city at China Basin, the home of the Giants baseball park, initially named Pacbell Park, now in deference to Pacbell’s owner, SBC Park. Left on 3rd Avenue and north through the area now called South of Mission because of all the condominium development of the past 15 years gentrifying a blighted warehouse district with yuppie living places and businesses to serve these urban neighborhoods, grocers, restaurants—fast food to fine dining, drug stores, dry cleaners, coffee shops and Kinko’s copy stops. Everything suburbanites find strung out in strip malls and accessible by car, South of Mission provides, within walking distance of most $400,000-plus, 1100-square foot condos. The city might have cleaned up some of the buildings, but the streets are no different than they were 30 years ago, today’s uneven bumpy surface paved over with successive layers of asphalt. The derelict concrete of the 101-overpass a reminder that the beauty may have had a facelift, but the arteries feeding this body are decrepit and in need of bypass surgery or at least a good Angioplasty.

The other element that has defied beautification is the homeless lurking in the shadows of the 101 overpass and in every nook and cranny they have not been evicted from by angry property owners. They are as constant as the City by the Bay, the flotsam and jetsam of a meritocracy that rewards the brightest and best and tolerates the dullest and the worst. They wander the streets, having given up on the go-go world around them, escaping into the comforting world of drugs and alcohol to become as oblivious of the world around them as the world around is oblivious of them. I try to turn a blind eye to these nameless forms, fearful that their lot could become my own. It is this fear that keeps me running to keep up with the herd of intellectual wildebeest galloping along this modern man’s Serengeti. I’m getting older, nearing the age of retirement. In the natural world, your reflexes slow, your endurance diminishes, your body becomes brittle and one day your natural predator takes you out and your body provides a bounty for the new life struggling to establish itself in this hostile terrain. In the modern world, your mind begins to slow, in the worst case you lapse into dementia and forget all you knew—complete intellectual meltdown, the equivalent to complete physical paralysis in the physical world, where a predator would put you out of your misery. In the intellectual world you vegetate consuming resources and in the end dying a humiliating death after having lost all control of your bodily functions. Death by predator, perhaps struggling to make a dignified exit, is a far more humane and distinguished departure.

I'm here to attend an electronics trade show; now you know why I'm in such a morbid mood.