The stresses of life in San Francisco have to do with the cost of living, traffic, and excessive fog in the summer--not necessarily in that order; few people would call it an unhappy place, however. People here are proud, all too proud perhaps, to call this home. (Of course the biggest stress factor that no one wants to think about is the possibility of an earthquake, but I won't dwell on that either.) So why do I need to search out those "lost places" of San Francisco? Because I also believe in the City of Raissa--in other words, those invisible threads of connection. And they cannot be forcefully woven together; they tend to thrive in lost places--not in centers of tourist activity.
Of course, the "lost" places aren't really lost--when you visit them, you realize that they hum with a quiet energy of their own. One example from the other day--after I walked around the reservoir in the Outer Sunset, then sat down with an espresso in the cafe, I glanced out the window and saw an Asian man, probably Chinese, probably about seventy years old, dressed in old-fashioned Chinese garb and walking at a glacially slow pace while balancing a long wooden pole on his shoulder. At the end of the pole dangled a medium-sized white garbage bag, stuffed with what appeared to be, well, garbage: an assortment of papers and rags and old cans. I don't know where he was going; he looked like someone you'd meet on a winding street in 1920s Shanghai (or my mental image of Shanghai in the 1920s since I can't say that I've actually been there). He unleashed that feeling in me--the feeling these lost places are supposed to unleash, I suppose--a feeling of uneasy happiness.
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