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After nearly a week in San Francisco, there is much to consider. Strangely enough, I came across the last Urbane Studies column I wrote for SFist.com tonight, while getting together some old files. 

I suppose I would have liked to have rewritten it, the beginning seeming to have come out breathlessly impatient to tell some truth. And so it is, the latter part of it speaks a truth that is as close as I probably ever came to what I wanted to say about how I felt about having loved and lived in that great city, only to learn that I needed to leave it. 

Writing is dissimulation, and even when I said what I meant, I relied on the complicity of a wordy disguise. Few I worked with knew what I did, and still fewer know as time and distance multiply. After my own fashion, I don’t often re-read what I’ve done, but I want to know that it still means what I meant it to mean.
What else can you hope for, if you’re writing your way out of town?

This is, as ever, the Ouroboros: go to the end to find my beginning. 

The following is a response to a piece published by the Seattle Times.To say that you are shaped by weather is to say that you are rock worn down by rain and salt. To claim your right to a canopy of trees is to deny that this is where gravity loses its hold as Boeing projects us further, faster. To say that no one else has purchase on this place, taken from others, is equivalent to licking your finger and squawking “Mine, mine, mine!” as you ruin a plate of party cookies. You, a native son whose sense of familial gravity was such that you never left, deny anyone could ever know what it is to be a native. And so it is: in my native place, transplants, excited to have moved to the city of their dreams, marveled that such a mythical city could produce children. “You are so lucky,” they declared, unflinching in their love of adopted place. And I was happy for them, and still I left. Now on my third city, I find Seattle not unlike a third bowl of porridge: just right. What you cannot know is the immense pleasure of being an outsider, of smelling the sweetness of this place for the first time, and how that lingering softness of forest floor and ozone from a first rain never leaves one’s blood. How, despite spending years in a far colder place, Seattle is moderate, with actual summers in lieu of chilling fog that sends the trees dripping fat drops. There is no forecast for such rain, and so when you leave the house on a sunny day you wear no fewer than three layers lest someone take you for a tourist who has overestimated the famous west coast sun. This, your screed, does not take into account the asylum that Seattle has provided for refugees from around the world. Forgive my Cambodian friend who cannot make it out to scale Rainier, he works six days of the week and never quite took to the weather despite his 30 or so years here. Speeches about character being built through labor are delivered by those who would have you believe that this is true simply because they say it is so: a sort of syllogistic abracadabra. This founding myth, one that keeps about as well as salmon in hot weather, is one that I know well. My great-grandparents made Seattle their home at the turn of the last century, and I’ve long had run of the Pacific Northwest before settling here. And yet, I am not a native: happily so. I bring something entirely different, and as a city is its people, I am glad that I can bring a scorn for provincialism and a hope that those of us who have seen what went wrong in other cities can see it go right here. So like a rock may you remain, and the weather of which you are so profoundly proud to have withstood will, in time, wear you down. A chip the size of an old-growth conifer on your shoulder, may you bear witness as your city is overrun by change. And so I hope it never ends, because when our city stops changing, we meet our end.   
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The following is a response to a piece published by the Seattle Times.

To say that you are shaped by weather is to say that you are rock worn down by rain and salt. To claim your right to a canopy of trees is to deny that this is where gravity loses its hold as Boeing projects us further, faster. To say that no one else has purchase on this place, taken from others, is equivalent to licking your finger and squawking “Mine, mine, mine!” as you ruin a plate of party cookies.

You, a native son whose sense of familial gravity was such that you never left, deny anyone could ever know what it is to be a native.

And so it is: in my native place, transplants, excited to have moved to the city of their dreams, marveled that such a mythical city could produce children.

“You are so lucky,” they declared, unflinching in their love of adopted place.

And I was happy for them, and still I left. Now on my third city, I find Seattle not unlike a third bowl of porridge: just right.

What you cannot know is the immense pleasure of being an outsider, of smelling the sweetness of this place for the first time, and how that lingering softness of forest floor and ozone from a first rain never leaves one’s blood. How, despite spending years in a far colder place, Seattle is moderate, with actual summers in lieu of chilling fog that sends the trees dripping fat drops. There is no forecast for such rain, and so when you leave the house on a sunny day you wear no fewer than three layers lest someone take you for a tourist who has overestimated the famous west coast sun.

This, your screed, does not take into account the asylum that Seattle has provided for refugees from around the world. Forgive my Cambodian friend who cannot make it out to scale Rainier, he works six days of the week and never quite took to the weather despite his 30 or so years here.

Speeches about character being built through labor are delivered by those who would have you believe that this is true simply because they say it is so: a sort of syllogistic abracadabra.

This founding myth, one that keeps about as well as salmon in hot weather, is one that I know well. My great-grandparents made Seattle their home at the turn of the last century, and I’ve long had run of the Pacific Northwest before settling here. And yet, I am not a native: happily so. I bring something entirely different, and as a city is its people, I am glad that I can bring a scorn for provincialism and a hope that those of us who have seen what went wrong in other cities can see it go right here.

So like a rock may you remain, and the weather of which you are so profoundly proud to have withstood will, in time, wear you down. A chip the size of an old-growth conifer on your shoulder, may you bear witness as your city is overrun by change.

And so I hope it never ends, because when our city stops changing, we meet our end.   

A moment, please, of your time. A city is a city is a city, but for those that make it up as they go along.  And the city is, above all else, a made-up thing.  San Francisco was a duney mess, prone to blinding sandstorms.  Men of engineering and money determined to increase their fortunes did so by trumpeting the greatness of a lick of land, a foggy peninsula with an excellent natural bay and negligible access to potable water.  What nature does not perfect can be molded, dredged, drained, and torqued into precision: nothing new here.   San Francisco is largely a figment, a conceptual oasis of bliss forgiving of race, sex, and all else that some might call transgression.  It is your oasis, if you can afford it.   It is the best of cities.  It is the worst of cities.
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A moment, please, of your time.

A city is a city is a city, but for those that make it up as they go along.  And the city is, above all else, a made-up thing.  San Francisco was a duney mess, prone to blinding sandstorms. 
Men of engineering and money determined to increase their fortunes did so by trumpeting the greatness of a lick of land, a foggy peninsula with an excellent natural bay and negligible access to potable water.  What nature does not perfect can be molded, dredged, drained, and torqued into precision: nothing new here.  

San Francisco is largely a figment, a conceptual oasis of bliss forgiving of race, sex, and all else that some might call transgression.  It is your oasis, if you can afford it.  

It is the best of cities.  It is the worst of cities.

Further to Greenwashing

“…technological fixes are undoubtedly useful, but they conceal a basic truth.  Rather than trying to change behavior to reduce carbon emissions, politicians and entrepreneurs have sold greening to the public as a kind of accessorizing. 
‘Keep doing what you’re doing,’ is the message, just add a solar panel, a wind turbine, a bamboo floor, whatever. 
But a solar-heated house in the suburbs is still a house in the suburbs, and if you have to drive to it–even in a Prius–it’s hardly green.”

–Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis