San Francisco is sort of like a really cute guy you’re trying to pick up at a bar, only to find out he’s a total tease. After a while you just realize maybe he’s so conceited he just wants to see how hard you’ll work to get him in bed. Ultimately, he may be cute, but he just ain’t worth the effort.
San Francisco: sure is pretty, but just not worth the effort. Not only is it tough to live here day-by-day, but getting out has proved one of the most difficult challenges of my life.
Some random items to demonstrate my point:
Everyone else is leaving, and thus getting a moving van is either impossible or too damn expensive (based on the prices I’ve seen, we could ship all our possessions by FedEx Ground and pay slightly less than the cost of a cross-country UHaul).
Vacating our apartment is a total chore. Since moving with our crappy furniture would be more expensive than replacing it on the other side, we’re trying to give it away or throw it away. No one else has any more room than us, so it’s hard to offer it to friends and neighbors (considering the average apartment size is 12 sqft). Unfortunately, the trash cans provided for an entire 4-unit buidiing here offer less capacity than the containers my parents have at their house in Clovis. We’ve filled them to capacity, risking the “wrath” of the asshole downstairs in the process, for several weeks in a row, and still have rubbish out the wazoo. We’ve tried leaving them out for rubbish collectors to pick up, but sometimes the homeless people get to them first and soil them with excrement, rendering them undesireable for donation.
Our neighborhood, being in the ghetto setting in which 75% of all San Franciscans reside, does not give us that sense of safety which would prompt us to leave all our Earthly possessions on the street for 12 hours, and thus we were up all night keeping watch on our moving pod. We watched as a drunk pissed on it, various gangbangers loitered on the street around it playing loud music all night and bouncing their stupid cars, and wondering what the hell we’d actually do if anyone tried to break into the thing or vandalize it.
Goodwill, the Salvation Army, and miscellaneous other thrift dealers are incredinbly picky about what they will accept. The poor are so coddled here that only the best rubbish will do. No used tupperware, no matter the shape it’s in; no booksheelves or end tables with flaws, sticker residue, or any sign of age whatsoever present. No used pillows, furniture or matresses, lest the donor have drooled or had sex on the delicate fabric’s surface at some point in the past. We must be picky about what we take for free.
Finally, no cathode ray tubes whatsoever. Since the State of California started taxing the sale of CRTs supposedly to pay for their safe disposal, they’ve become the most difficult things on Earth to dispose of. This is primarily because anyone accepting one is deathly afraid it’s dead and will need to be thrown out, and those safe and easy disposal sites/methods for which this new tax was supposed to pay don’t seem to be any more available now than they were before…
A transcontinental move is a tough thing to do on a budget. David had done it before, albeit in the opposite direction. It in no way prepared him for how horrible an experience it would be to reverse. San Francisco hasn’t gone to any lengths to make this a place in which I wanted to stay, and strangely it’s not a bit easier to leave this shithole behind.
… I wish that guy would make up his mind: does he want me to fuck him or does he want to go home alone. At this point, I don’t care one way or another.