Out of Dodge

I'll be on the launch pad in just a few hours, ready to leave the big city and return to the less hectic but equally strange environment of a retired people's trailer park in southern California.

It's relatively peaceful right now on my daughter's little corner of San Francisco as twilight descends on (another) rainy Saturday. There's a steady rumble of engines accelerating off the four-way stop, and senseless muttering streaming by intermittently on the sidewalk. Close by, the hushed tinkle of a large mammal urinating (it might be canine or human) adds to the atmosphere of decrescendo. A block away the bizarre bazaar of Haight Straight is still humming along, as tourists and pleasure-seekers jostle with degenerates on both sidewalk margins of a permanent traffic jam.

You interact mainly with two types of people here. The first are prosperous, sophisticated, generally young artists and technicians. They're graphic, tattoo, or computer artists, dancers, computer engineering types, entrepreneurs. They wear used clothing, get around on bicycles and skateboards and public transport, eat mung dal and rice and vegetables and tea, recycle everything, and are generally low-key and humble. They disdain bragging, pretension, and outrageous ambition. I look at them and see the future, big time.

The other group is the homeless, the doped-up and intoxicated, habitual criminals, and the beggar class. They include the addicted, the insane, the addled, and the depraved. Their behavior is generally loud, aggressive, inappropriate and unpleasant, and frequently violent.

There are other neighborhoods where the experience of the city would be strikingly different from what it is here -- the Castro, for example. But everywhere, San Francisco, and I suspect other big, rich cities, offer the emigrant a bipolar existence.