Thursday, February 16, 2006

How Carless of Me

Today I cut my finger with the bread knife, so I put a tissue on it and applied as much pressure as I could with my thumb and waited for it to stop bleeding. Three hours later I was still waiting.

I realized I had to make a trip to the emergency room, and there happens to be one just a ten minutes walk from where I'm staying right now. If I'd been home, I would have had to drive 12 miles.

It would have been impossible for me to drive to the ER today because I don't have access to a car at the moment.

I also walked to the store and the laundromat this morning. It's true that there are a few things, like high-quality photo processing, for which I'll have to take the bus, but for the most part everything I need is in the neighborhood. That's how a neighborhood should be.

In Southern California, where I supposedly live (if you can call that living) there's no access to any kind of retail activity in the neighborhood. It's zoned residential -- single use zoning. No matter what you want, you have to climb into the petro-powered conveyance and drive to get it.

So right off the top of my head, I'd say the main difference between San Francisco and the rest of California (including the rest of the Bay Area) is that San Francisco is sane and rational, and the rest of the state, and most of the United States for that matter, is insane and irrational.

One sure sign of what I'm talking about is when you do see cars in this city, only rarely do they have those stupid ribbon magnets stuck to them.

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