This Mother’s Day we spent without our mothers. Instead we lapped up the sunshine hours with our friend Scotty, viewing his gorgeous newly renovated apartment on Guerrero Street in The Mission. The dreaded Mission.
There’s this battle of the neighborhoods that exists in San Francisco, like so many big cities in the world. Where you choose to live is supposed to say everything about you. And it’s (of course) one-sided. Reverse racism, so to speak. Let me explain.
If you choose to live in the Mission, the Haight, or anywhere inbetween in San Francisco you naturally absorb qualities such as edgy, “real”, and smart. You are also free to throw rocks. If you live in any of these areas, you can call people who live in The Marina, Cow Hollow or Pacific Heights any number of names. Some that have been thrown down in the sparring include “Baboonnettes”, sorority sisters, frat jerks, “snotty, stuck-up white women who think they’re super hot and have really stupid attitudes”, and my personal favorite “dude bros with their checkered shorts out of Macy’s and nautical star hats live here and throw up on street corners we have to stand on” (check the grammar). It seems to bring up so much hate and anger in people. In the end, the ugliness they intended to land on someone else boomerangs right back at them faster than they can finish their Bud.
I personally don’t associate my personality with any one area of a city. Having said that, I have always found the Marina to be clean, safe, pretty and full of interesting shops and cafes. It is also undoubtedly the most beautiful part of San Francisco. No one wants to admit that. For that reason it is also the most expensive, and also the most unaffordable. A a result, it attracts the young, successful set who are said to spend too much time admiring each other’s diamond rings and blowing their inflated salaries on overpriced foreign beer in frosted glasses.
If, on the other hand, you were to categorise the opposite end of the city (the one throwing judgements, remember?) you’d have to first climb over the piled trash, abandoned homeless trolley carts, and of course, sideswipe the broken windscreen glass. The Mission may have personality and history in the form of “infestation with $5 whores”, edge and inner-city reality, but beautiful it isn’t. It is possibly, very likely, really, “actually purgatory”. No getting around it.
Yet, if the Marinites took some time out of the workout, mani-pedi, couch-shopping activives to rate those on the opposite end of the city they would be crucified before they opened their lipsticked mouths. Perhaps this is the real price of living in the Marina.
In all my years of living in this great city, I have never ever heard a bad word spoken about the Mission by people who live on the water. Only that it is an expensive cabride away. Much like yelling racist slurs from the passing window at a black man waiting for the bus, this would not be ok.
I have this theory that is about as un-PC, and probably equally unpopular, as you can get. At a disappointing but standard restaurant opening last night I met two guys who work in the nightlife world in the Mission. They threw the usual pebbles and we apologised away. And then I asked them if they ever wanted to do anything else with their lives beyond serve beer from behind a bar for tips and a few lines of low quality blow. And surprisingly (or not) they assured me they didn’t. Life for them was too easy and resposiblities too few and far between. Forget the fact that they were both edging from an edgy lifestyle toward their middle thirties, still sharing a shoebox in a dirty part of town with a random guy of equal descent. None of this I could say out loud, obviously. Obnoxious Hipsters!
