How Many Hearts Are Left in San Francisco?

I am here tonight in San Francisco. It is eight o’clock, and I am already sitting on the bed I will use for the night, in part because I am reticent about walking the streets of this city at night, and in part because I am tired. San Francisco is well known for its forward looking facades, those row houses of tolerance and silicon savvy, and yet it seems to me, walking past the man selling acid on the corner, a woman wearing black lipstick and a fur trimmed vinyl coat, t-shirt shops, candy colored victorians, that this city of the future is in love with its past. It participates in a romanticization of summer it has never known, a single solstice that lives in infamy and forgets the many broken homes and hearts that also was that Summer of Love and the unavoidable autumn that followed. What separates the nostalgia in this town from the down-trodden pessimism of the middle west, i.e. their infatuation with the slogan Make America Great Again? In San Francisco, just like in Ohio, there is also a pining, a forgetting of pain, a half-hearted attempt to resurrect a long dead culture. Tie-dye, Janis Joplin mugs, a bevy of over priced vintage stores peddling polyester and suede, buckled boots and ripped up t-shirts — is this so different from a small town main street, lined with old fashioned store fronts, American flags, some rusted hunk of bronze dedicated to those fallen heroes perished in a myriad of battles long forsaken. But the backwards glance of San Francisco is different, it is not despairing. The nostalgia of San Francisco is the recounting of a time well loved, the heroes of another time, those day-trippers, activists, addicts, whose silhouette line the periphery of my city’s vision: these men and women, if they saw me, would love me. How differently a main street in Southern Ohio longs for yesteryear. It stands in resolute silence, storefronts empty, flags raised, and asks its past with some degree of insistence: “How did we lose it? How does a people lose the only world they’ve ever known?” It is a matter of misplaced siren songs; one chorus sings from the seat of some viscerally near horizon, and the other lays far beyond the chasm which stands between us and our past. Like some disturbed phantom, our nationhood lives out its poltergeist half-life. It cries out into the night that covers the expanse of the Great Plains, which hides the corroded corners of our fallen middle class, the ever stretching limbs of our cities, refused littered projects, suburban sprawl: “America,” she sobs, “Have you ever existed? Are you a memory gone or only a desert mirage, which calls me to a life which knows no peace and a destiny I cannot hope to speak?”