5 posts tagged “san francisco”
Depending on who you ask and what you consider "living", I've been in San Francisco for about 14 years now. Throughout all those years, I have never "experienced" Bay to Breakers until moving to Fell Street. Essentially for those of you who don't live in the Northern Death nor participate in debauchery, Wikipedia describes it as so:
The Bay to Breakers is an annual footrace which takes place in San Francisco, California. The name reflects the fact that the race starts at the northeast end of the downtown area a few blocks from The Embarcadero (adjacent to the bay) and runs west through the city to finish at the Great Highway (adjacent to the Pacific coast, where breakers crash onto Ocean Beach). The race is 7.46 miles (12 kilometers) long, and is run on the third Sunday in May.
Sounds fun right? I mean, foot races happen all the time in all sorts of cities. Kinda boring to watch but nothing spectacular happens. Well, that would be all good and fun if Bay to Breakers (B2B) was actually a foot race.
"But Grace, that makes no sense!" you might say. Sense cannot be made, it must be sensed. And so my story begins.
Completely unrelated, the night before (Saturday) I had tried to get some sleep early knowing at the warnings of my boyfriend that B2B was going to start at 6AM. Unfortunately my efforts were circumvented by my shitty new next door neighbours who must have missed the memo, by throwing a party the night before. Seemingly a dozen and a half people bled out of their apartment between 1:30AM and 3:30AM, out onto the street below my window, being loud and drunk. Needless to say, I got probably three hours of sleep before I was awakened in the early morning by periodic..
WOOOOO!!
By 10AM, my block is filled to the brim with the variety of frat kids and naked old men. I'm being completely serious. There were tons of naked old men. You don't seem to understand so let me try and make you understand: NAKED, OLD MEN WITH PENISES DANGLING FOR ALL TO SEE, WALKING SLOWLY AS TO BLIND YOU AS WELL AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE. DO NOT LOOK AWAY MY YOUNG FRIEND, FOR STARING AT IT WILL IMBUE YOU WITH MAGICAL POWERS OF VOMITING ON COMMAND. The naked old men had nothing on the frat kids though, believe it or not, who felt compelled to leave a wave of trash and destruction in their wake. Though I couldn't help but wonder how the naked men were going to get home, even going so far as to call my father and ask if they let naked people on the bus. His reply, "well, they probably have to get a newspaper or something to sit on, but I think they're let on." My dad is awesome.
I had a front row view from my third floor apartment window. Perhaps the worst fact of all is that when I took a shower at 9AM, that was the only silence I heard for the rest of the day. I was so tired, I swear I fell asleep a couple of times in there.
After experiencing the pain of hideous, poorly dressed and/or naked people drinking, getting drunk, puking, falling off their man-made faux floats, I decided to go into the eye of the storm. At this point, I had started drinking myself as to calm my insatiable anger. I'm a small girl with no health insurance or attorney, so I cannot afford to go beating people up. When I entered Hell's mouth (read: I went downstairs), I found that my apartment building's door was WIDE FREAKING OPEN, as apparently one of my neighbours throws a party or something during B2B.
Call me paranoid, but back when I lived in a different neighbourhood, not even a stone's throw away, we never left our doors open. Simply because people would come in and steal stuff. That's just the way San Francisco is. So standing outside my own front door, every single person who went in made me slightly more anxious. But the good news is, from the street, you can't see that many people flooding my block, so maybe I was spared seeing a few more naked old men.
Words cannot describe how many people were on my block in either direction. There was literally almost no room to move even on the side walk. I had to often times carry my dog because people were drunk and liable to trample him. If the people didn't crush him, the leagues of broken glass on the ground would have hurt him. In short, people were rude, drunk, and littered EVERYWHERE. I live across the street from a park, and the entirety of the park was covered in plastic cups and other alcoholic paraphernalia.
My boyfriend assured me that the chaos would end and I could sleep at noon. But noon came and went. No police came to shut down the party. And people just kept on getting more and more drunk. There were people passed out on the grass in the park across the street. Girls crying (sad drunks, lols) and more naked people. My father had left early in the morning to go to the finish line to take pictures, by 10AM he had returned home already. I called him up and asked him if he wanted to see the horrors that were occurring in front of my apartment. He sounded unenthusiastic and I don't blame him.
More time passed as the foot race turned block party got out of hand. And eventually, before 2PM, the cops tried shuffling people out of the streets so "clean up" could occur. But even after the city cleaners drenched my street in washing liquid, and other cleaners pressurized water hoses got my side walk, there was still the mess in the park and tons of drunk people sifting up and down my side walk looking for a party or just plain hammered.
After the atrocity of human existence was over, reading more peoples' complaints, I've come to realise that I was lucky. Sure, I was woken up early and had to deal with what could be construed as the seventh ring of Hell, I had the severe luck of living down the block from a plethora of porta-potties. Numerous people complained after the "race", that the college kids and general failures at life were peeing and pooping on their stoops, on their front doors, on their garage doors, in their flowers, or even stepping in the stuff and tracking it into their home.
For all the years I've been here, I have been blessed to have avoided this horribleness by living elsewhere. Now that I have experienced Bay to Breakers, my intense hatred for this city and the general area has intensified to a point where I have to not think about it, lest my brain explode.
The best/worst part? The drunk girl passed out in front of my apartment door. I was going to call an ambulance for her, just to be a dick because ambulance bills are expensive and people need to learn how much they can drink, but I got lazy and didn't want to touch her if the 911 operator asked me if she had a pulse. Basically I hate my new next door neighbours.
For one week out of every year, the Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard dock their ships at large cities and generally cause a ruckus for a week. This is called Fleet Week. They hold these at major cities like San Diego, San Francisco, and New York City.
In San Francisco, I'm not sure about other cities, we have the jolly luck of welcoming the Blue Angels. Basically Navy jets that perform aerial stunts and if you didn't know any better, make you think we were having a war on homeland soil. Partially growing up in San Francisco, the Blue Angels were a blessing and a curse. Going to a private school, sometimes we were allowed out of class to watch them practice. All the other times, we weren't allowed out of class and were forced to contend with the ever distracting sounds of vrooosh. If you had a test during Fleet Week, you were basically committing academic suicide since you couldn't concentrate long enough to write down two sentences of an essay question. Given how flimsy the buildings are made in San Francisco, there's no way to drown out the sound either.
Over the past couple of years, I've managed to sleep through Fleet Week. I could be wrong and we could just have not had Fleet Week for a while, thinking about the war that's going on and all. But I'm a pretty sound sleeper having been forced to sleep through all those earthquakes when I lived in Southern California.
My point is, for the sake of any U.S. government web spyders looking out for future terrorists, I love America, go team, U.S. #1. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Screw Fleet Week.
San Francisco is small. I don't think people realise that when they move here. To live here your whole life is basically signing off your freedom to fuck up and get away with it. Quite often I will go out and end up seeing (and then trying to avoid) multiple people that I know/have known. The chances of even seeing these people on the bus, regardless of the route, are ridiculously high.
The former acquaintance lottery is made worse if you consider most of the residents of this fine city to be annoying as hell. So I vote San Francisco to be the worst city to date in.
Hence why I import my relationships.
Neighbours on my block have felt the need, since yesterday, to blast their music (live or otherwise). I don't know where you live, but in San Francisco the blocks are hollow. As to say, imagine a square. Along the edge of that square there are houses but the delicious creamy center is practically empty. We don't have much fanfare when it comes to backyards so there's nothing to soak up the sound made by neighbours in their backyards. The trade-off is that no one ever goes into their backyard to do anything.
San Francisco isn't much of a everyone-live-in-a-house type place due to how overcrowded the city is. Almost every building in my neighbourhood is a four unit apartment building. Most of the buildings were built in the 60's and 70's, because I guess it was just a "good idea" at the time.
So what ends up happening is that you live in an apartment building with three other families so you don't really use the backyard because it's too awkward and it's too cold. (Seasons are for suckers.)
I live in the Richmond district (not to be confused with the city), where the majority is fobby Russians practically incapable of speaking English, elderly Asians and that's about it. But every now and then you have the wild cards. Like the blue-collar Irish kids who live up the block who're quite possibly the only people on my block who "do" things. (read: have makeshift rock shows in their backyard) I imagine them hanging out with my white next door neighbour who likes Social Distortion and ugly girls and works construction as well.
Of course the sound pollution is something you have to deal with when you don't own your own real estate. But I'd rather live in a big city where I can't own a home, than live in buttfuck nowhere.
The worst of the situation is that lately hipsters have been moving into my neighbourhood. I don't know why or how. Maybe they all cashed in their trust funds at once. But they're like roaches. Before the majority only hang out/lived on the other side of town. Or if they did live near me, it'd be the other side of the Richmond district. All I know is that they're ruining the aesthetics of this neighbourhood with their skinny jeans, crappy haircuts and Caucasian-ness.
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