Looney Town!
: San Francisco is nucking futs.
At various streetcorners, striking hotel workers are banging garbage cans and drums and running sirens and blowing whistles and causing a considerable nuisance. I arrive at the conference hotel. How long does that go on? I ask. Ten o’clock, they say, resigned. That’s nuts, I say. We wouldn’t stand for that in New York! I switch rooms four times until I finally find peace. I know they’re muttering “crazy New Yorker” at the desk and I don’t care.
Homeless are everywhere, as advertised. People walk three-legged dogs. Things are scruffy.
This is not the city I loved and lived in for many years, back when I was a columnist on the Examiner and the young man about town. This was the greatest city on earth.
Every time I came back to town back then and drove up 101, I eagerly anticipated taking that one last curve and having the vista of the city before me. It always made me smile.
This time, I take that curve and it looks like Sacramento: Just a bunch of nondescript boxes crowding around each other with the barest sign of the Transamerica meekly peeking out.
So far, so sad.
